[SOLVED] USB stick stuck on UDF

[stringfellow]

I am trying to repurpose a USB stick that previously had a Win 10 repair disc on it. When I deleted the one partition it had in Disks instead of saying 16GB free space it says CCCOMA_xxx 16GB UDF. I tried using USB Stick Formatter to see if it had some magic it would do to remove UDF, but no luck.

Do I have to use dd or some such now to ditch UDF and properly format this USB stick?

BTW, I can create a new partition and format it whatever I want and use the USB stick just fine. I just don't like that under that partition somewhere it is 'stuck' on UDF, whatever that means.

Thanks.

[Flemur]

When I deleted the one partition it had in Disks instead of saying 16GB free space it says CCCOMA_xxx 16GB UDF. I tried using USB Stick Formatter to see if it had some magic it would do to remove UDF, but no luck.

Try gparted; the device selector is in the upper-right corner of the GUI.

[stringfellow]

Thanks Flemur it's time I installed Gparted anyway. Looks really good.

[stringfellow]

GParted no help unfortunately. Doesn't give me any options besides Information. But I'm sure GParted will be useful for other stuff in future.

And strangely it is showing 6GB used and 10GB free in a 16GB USB stick. And this is with no partitions.

Should I research dd?

PS - This is a very low priority kind of thing. It's more for my own knowledge really.

[AndyMH]

Suggest you install mkusb:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/mkusb
It has an option to 'restore to a standard storage device' which will be safer than using dd. But if you want to use dd:

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sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=512 count=1

This will wipe the partition table on device sdx, so replace sdx with the mount for the usb stick. You can find out what this is with gparted, e.g. the stick plugged into my laptop is showing in gparted as sdd. Once this has been done you will need to use gparted to create a new partition table, suggest MSDOS, on the stick and then a new fat32 partition. If that doesn't work you could try:

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sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx

which will wipe the whole stick, and may take some time.

Be warned, not for nothing is dd also known as 'disk destroyer', get the syntax wrong, e.g. point to the wrong device, and you could wipe your system.

[stringfellow]

Thanks AndyMH. I will check out mkusb. And carefully try dd commands if that fails.

Marking this thread as solved as this is not a huge issue.