Reformat USB stick with a CD ISO9660 FS

[Dave Hall]

On Thu, 2008-06-12 at 21:40 +1000, Bevin Watson wrote:
> A couple of days ago the nice people from MBF handed out 512 Mb USB
> sticks at the train station.  It has a small ISO9660 (CD) partition
> which directs Windows users to their web site.  The rest (500 Mb or so)
> is left as an empty vfat partition.
> I did the right thing and went to the web site and read it in detail.
> Now I want to give the USB to my child.  He is too young to take out
> insurance so I want to remove CD partition to stop annoying pop-ups.
> It says the CD file system is read-only (obviously) and won't let me
> delete the files from it.  It seems the simplest thing is to just
> reformat the whole device.  However, I'm getting a little out of my
> league thinking about partitions versus the whole device.  fdisk etc.
> seem to be partition-based.  Should I just "dd" all over it?
> nb: The USB stick shows up as /dev/scd1 (ISO 9660) and /dev/sdd1 (vfat)

Try this

Install gparted via Synaptic (System -> Administration)

put the usb stick into your PC

Unmount the devices (In nautilus right click and select unmount)

Run gparted (System -> Administration -> Partition Editor)

Enter your password when prompted

Select the usb stick from the drop down on the right (probably /dev/sdd
for you)

Make sure it shows the 2 partitions one ISO9660 and the other as vfat

Select each partition and hit delete

Click apply and confirm (and hope you selected the right device)

Now click on the unallocated area

Click the new button

By default it should have selected all of the device

Change the filesystem to FAT32

Click the Add button

Click Apply and confirm

Give it to your son and tell him the reason why private health insurance
is such a rip off is because the companies waste sooo much money on
stupid promotions like giving away USB keys which link to their website.
Also point out to him that part of the reason for such high petrol
prices is because of the amount of pointless plastic produced each year
which ends up in landfill within days on a consumer receiving it.  Then
finally tell your son to ask his IT teacher when his school will stop
wasting money on MS licenses

Ok, that last step is optional :)

Cheers

Dave