Comment 5 for bug 457737
Revision history for this message
| Bryan Ford (baford) wrote Re: USB Startup Disk Creator does nothing when trying to format a disk | #5 |
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f33e652
(Get the code!)
Same here - this time running on a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10 final release, 32-bit version, in Sun VirtualBox 3.0.10 on Mac OS X Leopard (using USB passthru to allow Ubuntu direct access to the USB flash drive I'm trying to install an Ubuntu Netbook Remix ISO image onto). The USB flash drive is "only" 1GB, but that presumably should be plenty to hold the 700MB ISO. The flash drive was apparently formatted in the standard Windows fashion for flash drives, with no partition table, just one big VFAT partition.
Ah, just figured out what the problem was. The USB drive was one of those that came formatted with no partition table - just one big "raw" VFAT32 file system, so it got mounted under Linux as (in my case) /dev/sdb instead /dev/sdb1. usb-creator apparently didn't know how to deal with that, so it just showed a line for /dev/sdb complaining that the volume needs to be formatted, with a "Format" button does nothing, and no "/dev/sdb1" line since there was indeed no /dev/sdb1.
I confirmed that this was indeed the problem by manually reformatting the USB drive with a partition table, and used Linux fdisk to create a /dev/sdb1 partition, then used Windows to format that partition (I know Linux can do it, but don't trust it to get it right :) ), then usb-creator was happy with the resulting disk. It still says "volume needs to be formatted" when the /dev/sdb line is selected, but there's no a /dev/sdb1 line and it's happy when that line is selected.
Just in case it's not obvious to other users how to reformat a USB drive with a partition table... First I did a 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1024 count=1024' to zero out the beginning of the disk where the partition table should be - probably not necessary but just for good measure. Then I used fdisk under Linux to set up the partition table with one primary partition covering the whole disk with a type tag of Win95 FAT32 (LBA). Then I formatted that partition under Windows - Linux mtools should probably be able to do it too, but I don't entirely trust it to get it right.
Cheers,
Bryan