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when I'm trying to create a partition table on my 8gb sd card, its showing this error: 

fdisk: unable to read /dev/sdb: Input/output error

I have used sudo fdisk -l , there the /dev/sdb is not listed, what should I do? please help me .

Tanmoy
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  • Make sure that the pendrive you wish to partition is not reserving any other name like /dev/sdc. – Anoop K P Feb 20 '14 at 20:40
  • its dev/sdb , showing in gparted partition, but in the terminal command list its not showing. – Tanmoy Feb 20 '14 at 20:43
  • Disconnect and connect the drive again. What do the dmesg print? – Anoop K P Feb 20 '14 at 20:45
  • sorry , what is dmesg print? – Tanmoy Feb 20 '14 at 20:55
  • type 'dmesg | tail' in terminal and paste the output here. – Anoop K P Feb 20 '14 at 20:56
  • [ 8486.956376] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE [ 8486.956380] sd 14:0:0:0: [sdb]
    [ 8486.956383] Sense Key : Medium Error [current] [ 8486.956390] Info fld=0x40 [ 8486.956393] sd 14:0:0:0: [sdb]
    [ 8486.956398] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error [ 8486.956403] sd 14:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: [ 8486.956406] Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 40 00 00 08 00 [ 8486.956422] end_request: critical target error, dev sdb, sector 64 [ 8486.956428] Buffer I/O error on device sdb, logical block 8     – Tanmoy Feb 20 '14 at 20:57
  • please help me, i want to format the partition table. – Tanmoy Feb 20 '14 at 21:02
  • Is the device visible in the list of 'lsusb'. Type it in terminal – Anoop K P Feb 20 '14 at 21:04
  • anyhow i managed to display in the list.. here is the p command for my sdb.. Disk /dev/sdb: 7822 MB, 7822376960 bytes 241 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1022 cylinders, total 15278080 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xa13f8044 – Tanmoy Feb 20 '14 at 21:13
  • Now what should i do for creating a partition table? its 8gb sd card – Tanmoy Feb 20 '14 at 21:15
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    The drive is toast; time to get a new one. – psusi Feb 20 '14 at 23:20
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    The pendrive/hard-disk whatever it is, is damaged, don't use it and certainly take backup of it's contents if you somehow manage to get it running(Doubtful). Also, edit your main post and post contents of command 'mount' . – We are Borg Dec 02 '15 at 09:53

2 Answers2

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As the device is present in the list of 'lsusb', the only option you could try out will be to format the pendrive completely.

But before that, open 'Disk Utility' and check whether the pendrive is present. If present you could format and partition from that application itself.

If the device is not found in 'Disk Utility', you will have to format using the command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd(x)

where (x) can be b, c, d etc. Care is to be taken as selecting the wrong device can even endup formatting your harddisk.

If your pendrive have a led indicator, it must indicate that the device is busy when the above command is executed.

muru
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Anoop K P
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  • but its showing Obytes space in my laptop. although i formatted in disk utility – Tanmoy Feb 20 '14 at 22:19
  • Use the command mentioned above – Anoop K P Feb 20 '14 at 22:21
  • THis time getting an error while formatting through disk utility.. error creating file system: command-line mkfs.vfat -l -n ............ – Tanmoy Feb 20 '14 at 22:39
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    and this is my dd command output: dd: writing to ‘/dev/sdb’: Input/output error 1+0 records in 0+0 records out 0 bytes (0 B) copied, 0.259265 s, 0.0 kB/s – Tanmoy Feb 20 '14 at 22:54
  • I have used this command "sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdb -I" too. which results: mkfs.vfat 3.0.16 (01 Mar 2013) mkfs.vfat: failed whilst writing reserved sector – Tanmoy Feb 20 '14 at 22:55
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Unfortunately an I/O error means that Linux cannot read or write your drive for whatever reason. Usually that means that the drive is broken, but I've heard of instances where it still works with Windows or OS X.

David Foerster
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