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I want to format my USB FlashDrive that was used as an Ubuntu bootable .iso.

I plugged in my FlashDrive into my laptop, then opened GParted, however it says The driver descriptor says the physical block size is 2048 bytes, but Linux says it is 512 bytes.. No further operation could be done.

However, when I am using application like Etcher, https://etcher.io/. It works and it can re - format my FlashDrive. The problem is that Etcher is an application to make a bootable .iso. There is no option to just format and not to make the FlashDrive bootable.

I have tested this in several machines and they are all have the same situation.

So, what are my options to format my FlashDrive into normal and non - bootable one if GParted fails?

notalentgeek
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  • Try this it works for me when a live iso messes up my usb sticks:
    http://askubuntu.com/questions/223598/how-to-format-a-usb-stick/223607 The magis is in the line from Colins answer:
    sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=512 count=16
    After this you can use Gparted or other aps to format the way you like!     – Ken Mollerup Mar 27 '17 at 05:42
  • You can use mkusb to restore your USB pendrive to a standard storage device. See this link and links from it, https://askubuntu.com/questions/769079/cant-format-ubuntu-installation-stick/897142#897142 – sudodus Mar 27 '17 at 07:29

2 Answers2

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This method will works for you:

  1. Plug in your flash drive and open the terminal

2- run sudo fdisk /dev/sdx replace x with your flash drive partition name

3- delete all partition on your flash drive by pressing d in fdisk and confirm it for each partition repeat this

4- create a new partition with press n and when asking partition type enter 7 .

5- finally press w to write changes in your flash drive.

6- run sudo partprobe -s to kernel be aware of changes and find the new partition on your flash drive or you can just plug out and plug in again.

7- run sudo mkfs.ntfs -f /dev/sdx to format your flash drive to ntfs .

that's it

Bahram
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I've seen this with the newer versions of Ubuntu. I'm guessing it's due to the fact that the USB gets formatted with an ISO 9660 partition. Here's what I typically do...

  • Find the name of the device (/dev/sdX where X is a letter). You can do this a couple of ways

    • Look it up in the gnome-disks utility

    • Unplug and reattach your usb device in question and run the following command in a terminal window (do not plug any other devices in before running this command).

      dmesg | tail -n 1 | grep -oP '\[sd[a-z]\]' | tr -d '[]' | awk '{print "/dev/"$1}'

      On my machine, this returns /dev/sdd which is the path to my USB device.

  • Armed with your device path, run

    sudo dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=10 of=/dev/sdX

    where /dev/sdX is the path you discovered above. This will clear out that nasty partition information that is causing your problem.

  • Remove your USB stick one last time and plug it back in again. You should once again be able to use Gparted to format your drive as you like.
b_laoshi
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