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A friend asked me to wipe/format a 2TB external HDD. It just doesn't work.

With lsblk -l I can see the disk which is formatted in NTFS and mounted as /dev/sdg1.

I tried mkfs.fat /dev/sdg1, resulting in mkfs.fat: /dev/sdg1 contains a mounted filesystem.

sudo umount /dev/sdg just takes forever and nothing happens.

Then I tried dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdg1 bs=1M, but again, nothing happens. No output; all I can do is close the terminal window and terminate the process.

Finally I entered sudo gparted. The program keeps loading until I plug out the external HDD, only then it shows my computer's SSD.

I've never had this problem with any hard drive before. Any ideas?

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    Have you looked at it's health, ie. using the drive's SMART technology. Is the drive healthy? help.ubuntu.com/community/Smartmontools
    – guiverc
    Mar 1, 2020 at 1:16
  • Apparently it doesn't support SMART. All I get is: /dev/sdg: Unknown USB bridge [0x0bc2:0xab26 (0x108)] Please specify device type with the -d option.
    – Malory
    Mar 1, 2020 at 9:03

1 Answer 1

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You must sudo umount /dev/sdg1 before you can change the disk's structure.

While the disk (or any partition) is mounted, the disk structure exists in two places: On the disk; and in kernel memory.

While the disk is NOT mounted, the structure information exists only on the disk.

A simple user program (gparted), even if running as root shoud NOT manipulate the disk structure in kernel memory. It doesn't know how (for every OS/kernel/filesystem version), there are synchronizations issues, etc.

Therefore, the umount /dev/sdg1 is required before you attack the disk with gparted.

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