USB stick partition problems

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 09:59:26AM -0500, bassix-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org wrote:
> I'm hoping someone else has experienced this and knows how to fix it...
> 
> 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).
> 
> Ironically, the stick works fine in windows (as a single 1GB drive).
> 
> I really want to be able to repartition the stick in linux again so
> that I can actually use it there! :-(

Maybe you need to blank the start of the device with something like:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=50

That way it can't detect any FAT table signatures at the start of the
device, which might be what makes it think there is a 1GB filesystem
there.  After that you should be able to partition it and make new
filesystems.

Len Sorensen
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