USB stick partition problems

[Daniel Armstrong]

On 3/8/06, bassix-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org <bassix-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
 > I've got a PNY 1GB USB 2.0 stick. When I first bought it, I was able
> to properly create 2 partitions and install a live distro on it (one
> partition around 700MB, the other around 277MB). Everything worked
> great.
>
> Then I needed to lend it to a friend (windows) so I deleted the
> partitions, booted into windows and formatted the whole stick (1GB)
> fat32. That worked fine.
>
> Now I am unable to repartition it in linux. When I plug it in, linux
> sees it as an unpartitioned device. In fdisk there are no partitions,
> so I can create one. If I create a 1GB partition and write changes,
> TWO 1GB devices show up on the desktop (one /dev/sda and one
> /dev/sda1), both saying they are 1GB. I am unable to write or access
> either however (I get mtab error).

I don't know if this will help, but I had a messed up partition table
on a Sandisk MP3 USB player - couldn't read/create/delete partitions
in Linux. I used the '-z' option in cfdisk to get around this. From
'man cfdisk':

-z     Start with zeroed partition table.  This option is useful when
you want to repartition your entire  disk.
Note:  this  option  does  not zero the partition table on the disk;
rather, it simply starts the program without reading the existing
partition table.

My steps:

# cfdisk -z /dev/sda

...then created a single FAT16 partition, wrote to disk, quit cfdisk,
then created a filesystem on the new partition...

# mkdosfs /dev/sda1

Works under Linux now.
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