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Ian
Asked: 2014-12-03 00:49:05 +0800 CST

Unable to Format USB Drive

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I have a 4.1 GB USB drive that has become unusable now. It previously had a Live version of Ubuntu 14.04 on it. I tried formatting it a couple of times through different techniques on GParted and the Disks Utility. None of them worked properly Gparted would tell me that a Partition Table was required. When I tried creating a partition table, it would give me a I/O error. When I tried the Discs utility, I would get a 'No Media Found' error.

I tried using the Ignore option on GParted tool.

Now whenever I start GParted, I get a error popup saying

Input/output error during read on /dev/sdc

The Window is titled "Libparted Bug Found!" sdc is the USB drive.

Screenshot after clicking on Ignore:

partitioning

4 Answers

  1. Here is the easy answer:

    1. Open gparted
    2. Select the correct device in the menu Devices
    3. Go to Device → Create Partition Table
    4. Choose msdos
    5. If that fails, throw away the USB stick: It's broken. :-(
    6. Now format
    7. If that fails, throw away the USB stick: It's broken. :-(
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  2. I got this hint from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2084152

    Try one or both.

    1. Since I have an extended partition containing many logical partitions including swap and boot, I used a USB install of GParted to add the label "lba".

    2. I booted into Windows Vista and ran chkdsk /f twice. The first time showed a lot of errors / bad sectors but the second run was clean.

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  3. I know this is not a ubuntu program however https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/ is confirmed to be very good by most manufacturers and has gotten me out of situations sd card related. Also failing that you may want to do a low level format of the sd

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  4. using sudo fdisk /dev/sdc

    folow the help, using o option to create a new partition table

    after that you can use Disk Utility or GPart to format you flashdisk

    Alternative way:

    sudo parted -a optimal /dev/sdc
mklabel msdos

    If success, continue to use Disk Utilities Good luck!

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