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Whenever I try formatting my Sandisk Cruzer Glide 16GB, I get this error message on Gparted. 

GParted 0.11.0 --enable-libparted-dmraid

Libparted 2.3

Create Primary Partition #1 (ntfs, 14.42 GiB) on /dev/sdc  00:00:00    ( ERROR )

create empty partition  00:00:00    ( ERROR )
libparted messages    ( INFO )

Unable to open /dev/sdc read-write (Read-only file system). /dev/sdc has been opened read-only.
Unable to open /dev/sdc read-write (Read-only file system). /dev/sdc has been opened read-only.
Unable to open /dev/sdc read-write (Read-only file system). /dev/sdc has been opened read-only.
Can't write to /dev/sdc, because it is opened read-only.
Unable to open /dev/sdc read-write (Read-only file system). /dev/sdc has been opened read-only.

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How do I disable / delete the read only filesystem? Is my USB corrupted?

Zanna
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Johnny Boy
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  • Is /dev/sdc being used by the system in anyway? such as mounting a partition in it during boot with ro option. Can you provide the output of the command sudo umount -a? – Anwar Sep 01 '12 at 06:37
  • Check the stick --- sometime they have a physical read-only switch on them. Check if you are superuser and if the stick is unmounted. If all this checks fails, try reporting the lines that appears in /var/log/syslog when you plug the stick in. If all else fails, I will suggest to try to zero the device with dd --- but it's a last option kind of thing. (And yes, it can be that it's physically damaged. It happens.) – Rmano Nov 09 '15 at 09:14
  • I'd say bad news - the drive is broken. I've had same issue with my friend's usb drive. I tried re-formating it, but since filesystem is read-only, gparted cannot even open it. And the drive is empty. And it doesn't work on any OS - Mac, windows, Linux – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Dec 14 '15 at 12:16
  • See this answer to a similar question, https://askubuntu.com/questions/877141/format-the-sd-card-with-dd-command/877144#877144 – sudodus Jan 29 '17 at 08:21
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    This link might also help, https://askubuntu.com/questions/22381/how-to-format-a-usb-flash-drive/911791#911791 – sudodus May 07 '17 at 02:24

1 Answers1

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I had the same problem. The issue at my case was that it was formatted as Ubuntu live CD. And instead of listing the mounpoint of the USB itself in /etc/mtab, the Live-Folder within the USB was listed. Therefore, it was impossible to unmount the USB-drive itself. My solution was to remove the mountpoint of the USB with the command

$ sudo rm -rf /media/<name of drive>

This had the same effect as unmounting the USB and I was able to use gparted for further steps (formatting etc.)

Martin Heimsoth
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