[Bug 996188] Re: Gparted Hosed my USB Thumb Drive

[Phillip Susi]

I'm afraid your description is too vague to give a meaningful response.
If you did zero the whole disk, then it no longer has a partition table,
which is why it shows up as unpartitioned.  You will need to create a
partition table ( disklabel ) and then you should be able to create a
new partition and format it with a filesystem.  It sounds like you may
have used fdisk to create a partition and not formatted it with a
filesystem, which would cause gparted to show the partition type as
unknown.

When reporting bugs, it is important to describe in detail, what you
did, what happened, and what you expected to happen instead.


** Changed in: gparted (Ubuntu)
       Status: New => Incomplete

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/996188

Title:
  Gparted Hosed my USB Thumb Drive

Status in “gparted” package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  Just a note, not an accusation. I thought I'd repurpose a 1Gb thumb
  drive (which I got free with the Economist magazine) to act as a
  filesystem for an NSLU2 (an Arm computer which can run a cut-down
  Debian). Before beginning on this job, the thumb drive had a
  functioning FAT32 filesystem on it which I was able to read and write
  to.

  I proceeded to create various partitions on it (or try to). By the end
  of the attempt, and after trying to fix the bugs I was encountering by
  trying to do the same with FDisk, I have a Thumb drive which I can't
  create a filesystem on at all. Each time I try to do this, GParted
  reloads the drive and identifies the target partition as Unknown.

  Finally I tried to return it to factory configuration - a single
  monolithic FAT32 partition, and it seems I now have a totally dead USB
  stick. Writing /dev/zero across the whole stick as /dev/sdb didn't
  seem to help either, though I thought that might reset it.

  I thought these things were just a series of bytes stored in memory,
  and everything else was filesystem metadata conventions. Maybe it
  decided to give up at exactly the moment I fired up GParted, but that
  would be weird.

  Any ideas what happened? Can I get it back?

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
  Package: gparted 0.8.1-1ubuntu4
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-19.33-generic-pae 3.0.27
  Uname: Linux 3.0.0-19-generic-pae i686
  ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu4
  Architecture: i386
  Date: Mon May  7 21:55:55 2012
  EcryptfsInUse: Yes
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" - Release i386 (20111012)
  ProcEnviron:
   LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
   PATH=(custom, no user)
   LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  SourcePackage: gparted
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2012-04-04 (33 days ago)

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