GNome Partition Editor

[Jason E. Dorfler]

Peter Garrett wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
Thank you very much.

-- 
Jason E. Dorfler

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