orange71

I have a 2Gb DT Kingston secure USB stick which somehow I have contrived to partially reformat using Gparted - however it now only shows 15Mb of unallocated space and that's it - I cannot seem to get the full empty 2Gb back again.

Is it because it used to have windows based secure software on it - has it 'locked down' the drive so it's now useless?

I just want to have 2Gb of EXT type space!

tpl

with the stick inserted, try

fdisk -l

should show the name--sda, or sdb or whatever: suppose sda

fdisk /dev/sda

p: shows existing partitions
d: to delate one by one
w: to writeback with no partitions
q: to quit

then do it again with fdisk

fdisk /dev/hda

n: to make new partition
p: primary
1: first
(accept defaults)
w:
q:

then make a file system

fsck.ext3 /dev/sda

should have you up and running again

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orange71

I checked the device in Gparted - it's definitely hdd, yet I get:

ed@ed-desktop ~ $ fdisk /dev/hdd

Unable to open /dev/hdd

Rubberman

You cannot format a mounted drive. You need to umount it first, then you can repartition and/or reformat it.

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orange71

it's not mounted as none of it is allocated

it just seems odd that it used to be 2Gb, and now it only shows 15Mb total