clean up a memory stick

Question

I'm trying to create a bootable copy of Kubuntu on a memory stick using the Startup Disk Creator. The trouble is that the memory stick seems to be incorrectly formatted. The KDE Partition Manager indicates that /dev/sdb1 is there and occupies the whole disk, but when I try to check and repair the partition I get a message "There were errors while applying operations. Aborted."

Does that mean that the memory stick is actually defective? If it isn't, how can I get past this?

Answer 1

I've most often seen gparted used for partitioning & formatting, it's quite robust & should give you more detailed error messages than "there were errors." I wouldn't assume the usb were bad just yet.

You could use a terminal to check the drive's filesystem too (not really necessary just to repartition / reformat) with fsck /dev/sdb1 probably. It should be unmounted first (umount).

And sudo parted -l or sudo fdisk -l should say what filesystem type it has, fsck (and mount) can usually auto-detect the type, but you can pick the specific fsck.ext3 or fsck.vfat and use different options, if interested.

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For creating a live usb I'd use a technique like described here on pendrivelinux.com or here on archlinux's wiki, or here:

• See https://askubuntu.com/a/554834/129271

  Cliff Notes:

  1. Mount the usb
  2. Install grub grub-install --force --no-floppy --boot-directory=/mnt/USB/boot /dev/sdx (replacing x with your actual USB device & /mnt/usb with mounted dir)
  3. Put demo grub.cfg ( http://pendrivelinux.com/downloads/multibootlinux/grub.cfg ) in /mnt/USB/boot/grub and edit to match your iso's

Answer 2

Write zeros to the usb stick with terminal if you have another machine with Ubuntu. It will wipe the partition

sudo shred -v /dev/sda or sdb etc.

Answer 3

I don't partition memory sticks. I fixed the not recognizing the memory stick problem this way. Using Startup Disk Creator to make a boot-able memory stick works OK as long as you don't try to Erase the memory stick. The memory stick looses its FAT32 table if you Erase, making it unrecognizable to the OS. I could not find an App on Ubuntu 15.04 to re-format a memory stick, so I re-formatted to FAT32 on a Windows 7 machine. It takes about ten seconds to do. I was able to create a boot-able memory stick once the FAT32 table was recreated. I am new to Ubuntu, so maybe there is some way under Ubuntu to format memory sticks, but I don't know the name of the App. I have a problem with trying to modify or add to the Ubuntu code.