Getting rid of an iso file on a usb stick...

[voidpointer69]

Hi all,

I have a 160 GB usb stick that has an iso file on it that I can't get rid of.

If I plug the stick in, I am shown two partitions to act upon. One is a normal ext4 and the other is this iso filesystem with an old SuSE "Live CD" on it.

I was able to go into either partition and read stuff from them.

I am trying to clear the stick and have one ext4 partition on it. Using gparted, all I can see is the first partition of 15gb and it seems that gparted thinks that this is the whole "disc".

The iso system is always mounted ro even if I try to mount it myself.

Any clues?

Cheers.

[oz]

If you haven't tried it already... you could try using gparted under a liveCD. With any luck it might allow you to access and remove it.

[voidpointer69]

Hi OZ. Yes, tried gparted standalone and as part of my normal installation. Same story. I doesn't seem to "see" the ISO and shows only the 15gb partition. Weird. I wonder what's up.

Cheers - VP

[oz]

If the file resides in some kind of security partition on the device, you might need to find the fix on the manufacturer's website. I had to do that with a couple of my own USB sticks and the fix they provided worked perfectly.

[whs]

Have you tried reformatting the stick. If nothing else, on a Windows system.

[elija]

Could it be that the iso partition is mounted? The partitioner in some installers won't see mounted partitions

[voidpointer69]

Not sure elija.

I contacted Kingston as per oz's suggestion and they pointed me to HDD guru and I did a low-level reformat.

No more ISO even though I did lose a bit more of the capacity than I would have thought. The man at Kingston told me to use a FAT filesystem instead!

[oz]

The man at Kingston told me to use a FAT filesystem instead!

I always use FAT32 on my own sticks and have had no issues.

Fellow forum member, roky, posted about a new FS a few days ago that looks interesting (and maybe good for flash drives), but I've not tested it and probably won't until it has matured a bit:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/cof...le-system.html

[Rubberman]

Have you tried running fdisk on the drive and installing a clean MBR? I've never seen that fail to reset a drive (SSD or otherwise) to factory settings.

[voidpointer69]

Rubberman. No, I haven't because I didn't know I could.

Have just re-read the man for fdisk and cfdisk but didn't see the bit that would allow me to install a clean MBR. Do I just dd /dev/null into sector zero?