So, I have an old Sandisk Cruzer Edge 4GB USB drive, And I know how to format the usb, so I did what works for all USB drives, first, I used fdisk -l
to find my USB's file-system. Heres what came up:
Disk /dev/sdb: 4004 MB, 4004511744 bytes
124 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1017 cylinders, total 7821312 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0000000
Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table
So, I'm going on, I successfully unmounted the USB, then ran the command sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb
I get the error:
user@user:~$ sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb
mke2fs 1.42.9 (4-Feb-2014)
/dev/sdb is entire device, not just one partition!
Proceed anyway? (y,n) y
/dev/sdb: Read-only file system while setting up superblock
Please help? Thanks for any help!
PS: My USB doesn't show up in GParted, so don't tell me to try that please :)
/dev/sdb is entire device, not just one partition!
tells you everything you need to know. You need to first create a partition (/dev/sdb1
). I would tell you to use gparted, but you can also usecfdisk /dev/sdb
if you prefer that. Then,sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1
will workroot@user cfdisk /dev/sdb
Opened disk Read-Only - You have no permission to write
And from there all my changes inside cfdisk (even as root!) aren't saved and I still can't format the usb