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Upon trying to make a startup disk (USB) for Ubuntu 12.04, the system prevented boot loader installation. I'm getting message:

Error synchronizing after initial wipe: Timed out waiting for object (udisks-error-quark, 0)

Can I still use the startup disk?

troylatroy
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Ramesh Sukumaran
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  • The disk tool also allows you to easily encrypt a partition. Something gparted doesnt do as far as I can tell. This bug is causing features to be missing. –  Jun 20 '14 at 22:16
  • Probably you cannot still use the startup disk. It doesn't sound like it was made properly. I had similar issues. You may find this helpful: http://askubuntu.com/questions/471579/can-udisks-be-removed-from-14-04-and-replaced-with-the-functionality-of-disk-uti – Elder Geek Jul 15 '14 at 22:33
  • Delete the partitions on usb using a tool such as fdisk then try again. – Tim Jonas May 28 '16 at 16:02

2 Answers2

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This has been reported as a bug. But you can try this work around and see if it works. Install Gparted if you don't have it installed. If its not, just press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open Terminal. When it opens, run the command(s) below:

sudo apt-get install gparted

Once installed, open the application, and before formatting, make sure that you choose the right drive, and Unmount the disk by right clicking on the partition, and choose Unmount, then you can use the format To option, to format it to whatever type of file system you wish. Once done click on the green check mark to apply the changes.

enter image description here

Mitch
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  • Unmount option displayed an error message: "Input/output error during read on /dev/sdc". How shall I proceed now? – Ramvignesh Aug 18 '14 at 00:38
  • What's the output of:sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc? – Mitch Aug 18 '14 at 05:13
  • Please look here for the output of sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc – Ramvignesh Aug 19 '14 at 01:52
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    Try running sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc and let me know. – Mitch Aug 19 '14 at 05:17
  • Done! The result for it is here. – Ramvignesh Aug 19 '14 at 15:08
  • The problem is with the utility and seen mostly with respect to ntfs drives. Gparted solves it. But remember to select it as a primary partition – Roopesh90 Sep 03 '14 at 05:23
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    I was getting this error Error synchronizing after initial wipe: Timed out waiting for object (udisks-error-quark, 0) it worked, thanks :) – Vipin Verma Sep 16 '14 at 06:39
  • You can also follow the workaround described in the bug: in the disk utility, instead of formatting from the cog menu, you can select the partition, delete it with the "-" icon, and create a new partition. – stragu Mar 21 '15 at 01:10
  • It appears that "Error synchronizing" happens every time you try to format a disk on multiple computers. Wow. Seems that should have been fixed by now. – NoBugs Jul 19 '17 at 06:45
  • with gdparted installed, launching it, when it read the usb device it throw same error as when I trying to format it: The driver descriptor says the physical block size is 2048 bytes, but Linux says it is 512 bytes. Is my usb blocked on write as I read somewhere, because when installing the ubuntu live installer, it blocked the usb? – Carmine May 12 '18 at 07:24
  • I was able to unallocated the "free" space that was read-only but not able to format via Ubuntu, cause where is wrote the usb-ubuntu live was blocking it. From W7 instead it allow me to format the free space (14 Gb) and rescue all the free space. This way I lost only 2 GB. – Carmine May 12 '18 at 08:42
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    This bug is still present in 18.04 LTS – Ini Dec 08 '18 at 19:21
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    This bug is still present in 20.04.02 LTS – Gri Ma Aug 04 '21 at 18:28
  • This answer didn't work for me, with Gparted I get an error every time I try to create a partition table:

    Libparted Error Input/output error during write on /dev/sdf

     – Raleigh L. Jul 18 '22 at 06:17
  • See How to run a checkdisk? – Mitch Jul 18 '22 at 09:42
  • I solved the similar problem: https://askubuntu.com/a/1478086/849328 – luisito_36 Jul 16 '23 at 02:50
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A weird solution that worked for me where GParted did not, was to format it using Mac OS X's Disk Utility initially (not the file system I ultimately wanted). Then I was able to format it on Ubuntu to NTFS which is what I wanted, and didn't encounter any timeout.

Sridhar Sarnobat
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    Cool.... What I did was that as it was startup disk, by going into disks removed the partition and freed all space then formatted to NTFS format which released the storage and the again format to FAT. – kshitij Dec 24 '20 at 10:27