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Sourabh
Asked: 2014-02-05 08:35:41 +0800 CST

USB Drive - Space missing after failed attempt to make it bootable

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I was trying to make my USB drive bootable to install Arch (I used dd to write Arch ISO to the USB Drive) but the process was stopped half-way. The drive stopped responding so I tried sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1 and it did work, in a way, now I get only 2GB (its of total 4GB).

Before writing arch's ISO, the drive was MBR, but after the failed attempt Gparted said that it thinks its GPT. I recreated the partition table choosing MSDOS in menu (is it same as MBR?) and choose ext2 file system.

Now it works on Ubuntu but get this when I unmount it:

Error ejecting /dev/sdb: Command-line `eject "/dev/sdb"' exited with non-zero exit
status 1: eject: tried to use `/dev/sdb' as device name but it is no block device
eject: tried to use `.//dev/sdb' as device name but it is no block device
eject: unable to find or open device for: `/dev/sdb'

Something like this is also happening to my External HDD (I keep messing up, I know!). It also says 2GB. I think dd messed it up.

How can I get the lost space back? I would like a general approach to change partiton to MBR and and reformat my drive (USB and Ext HDD) completely. No Data on any of USB Drives is important.

partitioning

1 Answers

  1. Try to eject the mounted partition on the disk,not the whole disk.

    If an usb is inserted,the partition which was automatically mounted was like /dev/sdb1 and not just like /dev/sdb.

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