How to re-format readonly USB drive

[Lakshmipathi.G]

Hi -
I have an USB drive formatted as readonly ISO9660 . I need to reformat it .
I have tried normal mkfs. But they failed saying "read-only filesystem" .
Then tried gparted,  Its also not working,seems like not even detecting
usb.  Running from command line "parted -l" says-

Warning: Unable to open /dev/sr1 read-write (Read-only file system).
/dev/sr1
has been opened read-only.
Error: /dev/sr1: unrecognised disk label

Any thoughts?

-- 
----
Cheers,
Lakshmipathi.G
FOSS Programmer.
www.giis.co.in

[Debayan Banerjee]

On 7 March 2011 16:33, Lakshmipathi.G <lakshmipathi.g(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  Hi -
>  I have an USB drive formatted as readonly ISO9660 . I need to reformat it . 
mkfs.vfat -I /dev/sdb

-- 
Debayan Banerjee

[Lakshmipathi.G]

No,mkfs is not working. I tried vfat,ext2,ext3 but everything fails .

strace output -
open("/dev/sr1", O_RDWR|O_EXCL)         = -1 EROFS (Read-only file system)
write(2, "mkfs.vfat: unable to open /dev/s"..., 35mkfs.vfat: unable to open
/dev/sr1
) = 35
exit_group(1)                           = ?



On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 4:37 PM, Debayan Banerjee <debayanin(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote:

>  On 7 March 2011 16:33, Lakshmipathi.G
> <lakshmipathi.g(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  > Hi -
>  > I have an USB drive formatted as readonly ISO9660 . I need to reformat it
>  .
>
>  mkfs.vfat -I /dev/sdb
>
>  --
>  Debayan Banerjee
>  _______________________________________________
>  india mailing list
>  india(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/india
>  


-- 
----
Cheers,
Lakshmipathi.G
FOSS Programmer.
www.giis.co.in

[Gaurav Menghani]

Hi,

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 4:33 PM, Lakshmipathi.G <lakshmipathi.g(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote:

>  Hi -
>  I have an USB drive formatted as readonly ISO9660 . I need to reformat it
>  . 

I used the dd command to write a string of 'zeroes' spanning the entire
drive (which will take some time). Then formatted it appropriately. Check
the man page of dd for the exact arguments.

Worked fine for me, check if it suits you.
-- 
Gaurav Menghani

[Ankur Sinha]

On Mon, 2011-03-07 at 16:33 +0530, Lakshmipathi.G wrote:
>  Hi -
>  I have an USB drive formatted as readonly ISO9660 . I need to reformat
>  it . I have tried normal mkfs. But they failed saying "read-only
>  filesystem" . Then tried gparted,  Its also not working,seems like not
>  even detecting usb.  Running from command line "parted -l" says-
>  
>  Warning: Unable to open /dev/sr1 read-write (Read-only file
>  system).  /dev/sr1
>  has been opened read-only.
>  Error: /dev/sr1: unrecognised disk label 
>  
>  Any thoughts?
>  
>   
How do you format a drive as "read only"? When my usb showed this
behaviour, it had meant that the drive had gone bad. 

Ankur

[Lakshmipathi.G]

Nothing seems to be working.I think, usb has some-kind of physical write
protection switch (somewhere,which i don't know)
on its hardware. (USB drive was  one of my old data card - I give up for now
- may be get back at this some time later. :)) .. thanks for all your
suggestions and time.


-- 
----
Cheers,
Lakshmipathi.G
FOSS Programmer.
www.giis.co.in