How to erase and merge partitions to Ubuntu start up USB drive?

Question

I have a USB start up drive with 2 partitions. How can I erase them? I cannot.

If gparted fails, you can use mkusb to erase the first mibibyte, and then use gparted to create a partition table and after that the partitions that you want. If there are still problems, you can analyze them, and if you are lucky solve them, according to the following link, Analysis of the problem — sudodus, Jan 09 '19 at 11:35

score 5 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 12 '20 at 14:37

5

unmount the USB stick by right-clicking on it
Start gparted and in the top right cornet, take the correct USB drive /dev/XdY where X and Y denoninate your USB stick.
Go to device and click Create partition table and take msdos if you want to be able to boot the USB on BIO machines and take gpt for all other use cases
Create at least one partition and format it

If any of the above steps fail,

If that also fails, your USB stick has a hardware problem. Please replace it.

edited Jun 12 '20 at 14:37

Community

answered Jan 09 '19 at 16:33

Fabby

Cannot be more complete than this. @sudodus ;-) – Fabby Jan 09 '19 at 17:00
+1; I think the steps of this answer can help many people with similar problems :-) – sudodus Jan 09 '19 at 18:50

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 10 '19 at 12:42

1

Merging Partitions

Rsync and Grsync, (Graphical Rsync) are tools for copying and syncing partitions.

Rsync and Grsync are available from Ubuntu Software.

The basics for using Rsync and Grsync are beyond the scope of this answer.

answered Jan 10 '19 at 12:42

C.S.Cameron

Perfect answer to merge partitions, but as OP seems to have a problem with the USB stick itself, didn't even go down that road. +1 for future users though adding the basics of Grsync wouldn't hurt... ;-) – Fabby Jan 10 '19 at 12:52
@Fabby: Now that you mention it, perhaps it is an ISO9660 problem. – C.S.Cameron Jan 10 '19 at 13:39