More Ubuntu "fun"

[montyben101]

If you looked at my other thread you will know that I dual booted windows and ubuntu onto my PC which basically broke windows. I did it by booting from a USB stick. However now the USB is "protected" or locked and I cant delete the ubuntu files from it.

Any ideas? Also please make it quite simple. I can copy and past stuff into the console but that's about it. I googled it but just got confused when people said stuff about "mounting" the USB stick....?

[ZedNova]

Make sure you don't have a USB stick with a physical switch that "Locks" the USB. If you don't, try formatting it.

If you can't format it, you may have to do some Command prompt wizardry.

[Norpo]

To be clear, i'm not sure it'd be the best idea to wipe the ubuntu USB stick... WHILE ubuntu is using it? Unless you wipe it from another computer, of course.

(fyi, mounting basically means "being able to use an external storage device", like a USB stick. It's a bit of a pain (speaking from personal experience, I had to do it with an Raspberry Pi and a external harddrive)

The reason it might be protected is because it would contain all the stuff ubuntu needs to operate inside, so it'd have strict permissions. I don't know how you would be able to wipe it (or if windows respects linux permissions), but you'd probably have to change it's permissions with sudo (or being root)

[montyben101]

Ubuntu is not using it as I have installed ubuntu on my main hard drive (sadly) If I try to manually change the permissions it doesn't let me

[steve_v]

If you put Ubuntu on it from a "hybrid" ISO image, (i.e. dd if=/image.iso of=/dev/sd[x]) it may have a funny partition layout & be detected as an ISO9660 filesystem... This will most likely cause it to be mounted read-only.

If this is the case, the 'mount' command will show the device mounted 'ro'. Either remount it read-write with 'mount /dev/sd[x] -o remount,rw' or...

If you want it *really* empty, nuke it with dd and reformat. - 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd[x]', where sd[x] is your usb stick (look at output of 'dmesg' after plugging it in).

Make very certain you use the right /dev/sd[x] as this will write zeros over the entire device.

If you only need to nail the partition table etc, just zero the first ~10MB or so, eg. 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd[x] bs=1M count=10'

Then repartition it with 'cfdisk', 'parted' or whatever GUI partitioning tool Ubuntu comes with.

Create one primary partition and format it with 'mkfs.[fstype]' - see 'man mkfs' or GUI partitioner above (Gparted springs to mind).

All of the above will require root privs, either prepend 'sudo' to each command or 'sudo su' to become root (or just 'su' if you have unlocked the root account).

The whole 'mounting' buisiness is common to all UNIX-like OSs - rather than a seperate 'root' for each device i.e. A: B: C: drive, there is one root (/) and other devices can be 'mounted' onto it at any point.

The convention is to put mount points under eg. /mnt/disk or /media/removable_disk, but anywhere will do. See 'man mount'.

Edited December 10, 2014 by steve_v
Add some links for the lazy

[sndrtj]

Mounting is basically the computational equivalent of "inserting". Like, in Windows you can "eject" usb drives; that process is called "unmounting" in UNIX/Linux parlance. So the reverse of this is mounting.

When it comes down to bootable usb drives, I have had this issue before tho. I just reformatted the drive.

Edited December 11, 2014 by sndrtj
so i wrote "mountain" in stead of "mounting". Time to go to bed, obviously!