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Thread ID: 125381 2012-06-24 02:14:00 USB flash drive write protected? dugimodo (138) Press F1
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1283663 2012-06-25 08:13:00 Thanks Fred, but that was painful enough to remind me why I avoid linux and it didn't work :( Can't zero fill a drive if it's write protected. what I need is to force a reformat but nothing works. If, as it seems, it's a hardware problem, it won't matter what OS you use.
I'm running Kubuntu LTS 12.04 on a old PC and it's so dog arsed slow as to be practically unusable.Hardly surprising :)
I don't know what the root password is, logged in as me and used sudo and it asked for a password that would be YOUR password (buntu does it all wrong ...)
but I got the fdisk -l to work at least, tried dd if=/dev/zer of=dev/sdb1 bs=1M and it came back with disk is read only. dmesg output should provide more info.
edit: to zero the drive you would want to point dd at the device itself (/dev/sdb) rather than the partition on it (/dev/sdb1)
From the desktop it won't mount the drive for the same reason. It should still mount 'read only'.
Is there a way back from the terminal to the desktop after doing ctrl-alt-f2? I had to reboot.:) Alt-F7 (or 8, whichever VT your X session is running on).
Also dmesg flashes a wall of text past too fast to read and with no obvious way to scroll back. Shift-PgUp

Hopefully your replacement works better :)
fred_fish (15241)
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