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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.

2 Answers 2

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You have a fairly well-written question compared to most first time posters, and it seems you've attempted to exhaust all the different approaches, at least using the tools you had available, so kudos to you.

Now, I have used iso-to-usb software such as Universal and UNetbootin, and although I didn't do exactly what you wanted here, I can suggest two ideas for your wish of a "normal" Ubuntu install to a large flash drive. They'll still require you to do some work, but I hope at least they can point you in the right direction:

  • UNetbootin persistence feature
  • disconnect internal drive

Unetbootin persistence feature

You didn't mention persistence yet, so I have to point out, this ability to have a distro both run and let you save files, preserve system changes, that's called persistence.

In this Unetbootin screenshot:

Screenshot of unetbootin windows version

If you look near the bottom, notice:

Space used to preserve files across reboots (Ubuntu only): 0 MB

That's how Unetbootin lets you have the option to have persistence.

So if you want space used for persistence to be 60 GB, for this field, change 0 to: 60000 before you hit OK

However for some reason Unetbootin does not always work. So if this fails for you, try the next suggestion

disconnect internal drive

A second thing you could try is

  1. safely power off, and open up your computer
  2. carefully disconnect all internal hard drives
  3. connect your 8 GB Ubuntu Live USB, and your 64 GB flash drive
  4. power on to boot into the 8 GB Ubuntu Live USB
  5. Try the install Ubuntu now, see if the 64 GB USB is now present and available for install

Multiple sources seem to mention this "disconnect internal drive" approach in order to see it during install. For example:

a 2011 post:

and then what you do is take out the HD from your pc, plug in the external one into the usb ports, and then you (should be able to) install to that external drive from the ubuntu install menu.

a 2012 forum thread:

it will be simpler if you disconnect the internal drive during the installation.

Hope this helps.

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dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=4M count=1

that should make /dev/sdb a very blank thing indeed. Assuming /dev/sdb is the flash drive. If not, you've just wiped something important.

Gparted should be able to partition it, though I believe it does have some bug in resizing partitions.

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