Karmic: how to delete /dev/sr1

[Mark Greenwood]

On Saturday 06 Mar 2010 18:58:09 Mirto Silvio Busico wrote:
> Hi all,
> I have an external USB hard disk from Western Digital (model My Passport).
> 
> This unit comes with two partitions, that I see and I can mount:
> 
>     * /dev/sr1 that is understood as a CD
>     * /dev/sdb1 that is a normal NTFS partition
> 
> If I mount the partitions "mount" says:
> 
> ...
> /dev/sr1 on /media/WD SmartWare type udf 
> (ro,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,uid=1000)
> /dev/sdb1 on /media/My Passport type fuseblk 
> (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096)
> 
> The problem is tah I'm not able to destroy, eliminate, kill :-) the 
> /dev/sr1 partition

I'm not a file system expert, however I've seen this sort of thing before.

Your /dev/sr1 partition is almost certainly a built-in utility partition - it probably contains something like backup software for Windows and is designed to auto-run when connected to a Windows computer. For this reason it has been marked read-only, and appears to have been formatted using the UDF filesystem. To the best of my knowledge there's only one way to create a UDF filesystem, and that is by using a CD burning application. This is why it gets detected as a CD and mounted as sr1 (instead of sdb2). gparted and fdisk won't understand it because they'll never need to. I don't think you will be able to remove it, not without doing some very dangerous low-level disk writes.

Whether this partition is a problem depends on how much of your disk it is using up. I reckon, probably not very much. It might even be some kind of external ROM. I would just ignore it.

Mark


> 
> With the partitions unmounted, nor "gparted" nor "fdisk" see the damned 
> partition
> 
> Trying "sudo fdisk /dev/sr1" I see:
> 
> mirto at msb02:~/script$ sudo fdisk /dev/sr1
> Impossibile scrivere la tabella delle partizioni.
> Nota: la dimensione del settore è 2048 (non 512)
> Il dispositivo non contiene né una tabella delle partizioni DOS valida, 
> né una disklabel Sun, SGI od OSF
> Building a new DOS disklabel with disk identifier 0x0c58531d.
> Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
> After that, of course, the previous content won't be recoverable.
> 
> Attenzione: il flag 0x0000 non valido della tabella delle partizioni 4 
> verrà corretto con w(rite)
> 
> Comando (m per richiamare la guida): p
> 
> Disco /dev/sr1: 700 MB, 700448768 byte
> 255 testine, 63 settori/tracce, 21 cilindri
> Unità = cilindri di 16065 * 2048 = 32901120 byte
> Identificativo disco: 0x0c58531d
> 
> Dispositivo Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> 
> Comando (m per richiamare la guida):
> 
> 
> How can I kill this partition?
> 
> 
> Thanks
>     Mirto
> 
> P.S. BTW I use Karmic 64 bit with updates of 4 March
> 
> 
> 
> 
>