GNome Partition Editor

[Peter Garrett]

On Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:16:46 +0800
"Jason E. Dorfler" <JDorfler at gmail.com> wrote:

> I also wanted to use the partition editor to 
> reformat the thumb drive to fat32 to make doubly sure that there is 
> nothing left on the drive.  At this time, after I tried, I received an 
> error stating it was not possible to format the drive.  Is there a thumb 
> drive formatter out there that can do this for me with Ubuntu?  Thanks.

You need to unmount the drive before you format it - for instance if the
drive is /dev/sdb1 , 

sudo umount /dev/sdb1                            <--- no "n" in "umount"

Notice that you format a *partition*, not the whole "drive" most USB thumb
drives have only one partition, so the device/partition would look like
/dev/sd?1  where "?" could be a,b,c and so on.

Once unmounted, you can format it either from the command line or using
something like gparted, (the Gnome partition editor).  

With gparted it's less nerve-wracking - just unmount using its GUI, then
format. Might be the easier way if you prefer that. If gparted can't
format the drive after you have unmounted it, something else is wrong...

Peter

-- 
"INX Is Not X" Live CD based on Ubuntu 7.04 : http://inx.maincontent.net
Screenshots slideshow: http://inx.maincontent.net/album/1.png.html
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