I am afraid I have totally destroyed a jump drive tonight, and I am incredibly frustrated, so bear with me.
I am currently running Ubuntu off of an 8 GB USB stick. Some background: my computer's hard drive is completely blown, and as I am waiting to get it replaced I am using ubuntu so I can use to computer.
I want to put ubuntu onto another 64 GB jump drive which I bought specifically for this purpose. It could be a while before I can get this hard drive replaced, and I will need to have an ubuntu installation next term for my classwork anyway. I wanted to put it onto a bigger drive to allow me to not have to worry as much about space for saving files.
So I followed the steps I have done every single time I have ever installed ubuntu to a flash drive; I went to a friend's windows computer, downloaded the ISO, installed UNetBootin, and made the 64gb drive a boot drive. It worked, I booted into Ubuntu, and tried to install it to the USB stick, and this is where things went wrong.
I want to install ubuntu to the USB drive, but when I went to install it it did not appear. All of the internal partitions of the laptop appeared, and the USB was not present at all. So I wiped the drive, reformatted it to be a FAT drive, thinking this could be the problem, and tried again. Same thing happened- the drive booted fine, but once again no drive appeared.
So I went another route. I used the dd command to try to copy my entire system off of this 8 gb drive onto the 64gb drive. This appeared to work- I booted into the drive fine, but it thought it only had 8 GB worth of space. When I looked at the disk in gparted, it showed that the dd command had merely created an 8gb partition, ignoring the other 56 GB on the disk.
So I switched back to my original jump drive and tried to expand the size of the newly created partition. This failed.
Now, I can't unmount that partition, no matter what I try. I have tried literally everything. I can't wipe the partition, nor can I forcefully delete it.
So I need a few things.
First, why can I not install to this drive? This is the piece that makes the least sense to me. It SHOULD be working- there is no clear reason for it not to. Is it the jump drive itself? It's a PNY 64gb turbo USB 3.0 flash drive, but the brand shouldn't matter. This shouldn't be a problem at all, it's something I have done a dozen times.
Second, how can I forcefully delete all partitions on the new jump drive and rebuild them? There are no files on it. File loss is not a problem. I understand that doing this will permanently get rid of all of the non-existent files on the drive. I need to totally reformat the thing.
All help is appreciated.