Hi. I am running 32 bit Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS, Gnome 3.28.2. I have inherited a 2GB USB drive which has 2 partitions. One of those partitions has a folder which is locked (there is no physical switch present) and read-only. I wish to reformat the whole drive with FAT32 and erase all the files present. …

[image] Sheli: cordx suggested seeing if my drive was in /etc/mtab and if it was mounted read-only. What do I type in the terminal to do that please? cat /etc/mtab will print out the contents of your mtab in the terminal. there will be a lot of info printed out. my three usb’s are at the very…

[image] Sheli: fdisk: failed to write disk label:operation not permitted. I can only think that you didn’t use sudo… make sure nobody (e.g. you) doesn’t have a file manager (e.g. nautilus) session looking at the mounted drive, or - a shell session in the mount point directory (check all your…

Hi Guys: Thanks for the suggestions. Here is some promised feedback of how I am getting on. I ‘cat /etc/mtab’ my usb drive and yes it is ro. I then used the method in the youtube video Daniel suggested and it indicated it had changed the ro to rw. However when coming to format the disk, the files we…

[image] Sheli: However when coming to format the disk, the files were still present. What do you mean? After formatting? Try: WARNING: the -f option allows usage on a mounted drive, so be absolutely sure you select the correct drive. You can remove the f option, if you manage to dismount t…

After I tried formatting the USB drive with GParted, I got the warning message above in my previous post which to me indicated the drive had not been formatted. I then checked to see if the files in the locked folder had gone; but they had not. It seems to me because I did not create the locked fo…

Another phenomenon that could explain this is that you try to mount the stick with the wrong file system. E.g. I once mounted a ZFS enabled disk as NTFS and it showed some old data from before I enabled ZFS on it. The data was, as expected, still on the HDD, but it just became visible after deletion…

Use the Gparted and delete the partition. After make other with the system files intended: ext4, reiserFS, ntfs …egc… Done ! :grinning:

@ Sheli Very sorry I entered in this thread very late. I have suggestion to make. Please open" Disks" from Menu Dash and you will find your Pen drive listed in the left side… Select it And Press Ctl+F. After that right click on the USB icon on the destop and you will have Format Menu as context M…

Thank you again to everyone who has tried to solve this problem. I have tried ubhat’s suggestion but that has not worked either. I have used Gparted to delete the partition and the locked files are still there. I shall keep trying because this has become a challenge and perhaps all of us could learn…

did you ever try [image] Akito: sudo badblocks -svf /dev/sdd -o badblocks1.log and/or something like smartmontools to try and make sure that the disk itself is sound?

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How do I reformat a USB stick containing read-only files?

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