USB drive nightmare

[SumBloke]

Arrrgh!
I'm having a nightmare setting up a Linux formatted USB. Lost a week on this already with unmounting my main drive and other fun games!
I'm stuck now at getting the partition to 100% of the drive. No matter what i do there is a small partition, hidden apparently, on the drive as well as my main partition.
Is there a way to get rig of that so the partition is 100% of the drive? Or is that hidden partition required for the Kubuntu OS?
Using Gnome partition manager. Have tried everythign including deleting all partitions and doing them again, formatting, you name it!

Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks for any tips

[vinnywright]

what are you trying to do ,,,,,,,,,just saying "linux formated USB" leaves a lot to the imagination .

tell me what we are trying to do and I will try to reproduce the steps and see what happens @hear

VINNY

[GreyGeek]

You mean like this:



I believe there is a small part of each stick that mfger's use to support their encryption ware that cannot be deleted.

I redid the partition on that 64Gb USB stick using GPT.




Using MSDOS instead of GPT I don't get the spare bits at the end, which cannot be used.

[SumBloke]

Thanks for the reply gents

Vinny: I suppose i dont really know how to answer that. I dont know the details. I just want a USB stick, in Linux format, to use on my linux machine. NOt sure how to do it or what the details are or what i need to do to make this happen. So far I have a stick, partitioned as GreyGeeks image, that is now auto mounting, but I cant [Edit] write to for some reason!

GreyGeek: Thanks for the images, very helpful. Yes I am getting a similar size inaccessable partition. 6% it is. So you couldnt get rid of it either? I assume then it should be there then. Did you mean that you re-did the drive but couldnt use all of it?

Any ideas why i cant write to the drive? And, what format option should i use? There are so many! Again, i just want to move files around. Nothing special.

Thanks for the feedback I really appreciate it

[SumBloke]

GG In your third image, is that your drive right after partitioning and formatting? As it looks like you have 2mb used space as well as that 6% partition at the start.

Is that because of the start position of the partition being the 2,048th sector?

[GreyGeek]

GG In your third image, is that your drive right after partitioning and formatting? As it looks like you have 2mb used space as well as that 6% partition at the start.

Is that because of the start position of the partition being the 2,048th sector?

The first is with using MSDOS and the second using GPT. Both were formatted to create as large as possible partition for Btrfs. On the one with the small, unused 2.98Mb partition I reduced the beginning sector from 2018 to sector 1024. It didn't help.

I noticed the loss of 8% of the space when the USB disk makers began putting Windows encryption on their sticks and making their label unchangeable. Even dd couldn't capture that 5Gb

[SumBloke]

Thanks GG i'm getting closer.
https://www.ampercent.com/recover-lo...sb-drive/9352/
http://www.disk-partition.com/articl...rive-4348.html

Which file system should I use? You used BTRFS right? Is that for everyday use? And any ideas why mine is currently read only? well, actually, im not sure that I can read anything, there is only a "lostandfound" folder on there. Confused.com

[claydoh]

If you format the drive with a Linux file system you will need to change permissions/ownership so that a non-root user can access it or write to it without sudo privileges.

Or format it to fat or exfat so you can use it on any OS as these do not support user access and ownership properties.

Most usb sticks don't offer built in back up or encryption so won't have any of the permanent partitions built in. I think the unused space (not an actual partition) is due to default block size options or something similar but it has been a while since I looked into this.

Sent from my LG-H900 using Tapatalk

[SumBloke]

The only thing I havent tried to get rid of that partition is high power magnets!

What IS that thing?

Thanks for the info claydoh. That's perfect for me to format in Linux under sudo only as its privacy I'm looking for.

If I could only get rid of that partition though!

[claydoh]

What brand and model stick is it? How big a space are we talking about here? How do you know there is a hidden partition?

[GreyGeek]

Thanks GG i'm getting closer.
https://www.ampercent.com/recover-lo...sb-drive/9352/
http://www.disk-partition.com/articl...rive-4348.html

Which file system should I use? You used BTRFS right? Is that for everyday use? And any ideas why mine is currently read only? well, actually, im not sure that I can read anything, there is only a "lostandfound" folder on there. Confused.com

I use Btrfs because my laptop is running Btrfs with RAID1 on two 750Gb HD's, with a third 750Gb HD as a repository for snapshots.

I use Btrfs as my fs because of its ability to pool storage resources of all kinds transparently and its CopyOnWrite feature which allows almost instantaneous snapshots of root and home (@ and @home), and easy roll back. I make ro snapshots of @ and @home before I do and updates or upgrades, in case I run into problems and have to roll back, which I haven't had to do yet, running Neon since it was first released.

Like Claydoh said, if you don't want to use sudo to read and write to a USB stick then change its permissions a/o ownership.

I used to use FAT32 as the fs but since I no longer install Kubuntu on other people's drives (they've all died) I do not need its lack of permission granularity.

[SumBloke]

Its an old generic 8gb.
Greygeeks first two posts above describe what Im talking about in accurate terminolgy.

ANy ideas?

[claydoh]

If the stick is formatted GPT, then it will have a backup copy of the GPT header and the partition table at the and of the disk, in unallocated space. I believe this space needed at both ends of a drive have to be at least 1mb. If the the header and partition table are on a block of the drive all by themselves, then that 1mb can't be used for anything else. this also means that sometimes disks will sometimes have the unallocated space at the front instead of the back end, even.

You might try changing the block size to perhaps 4k, which I believe you can do somewhere in gparted and/or KDE Partitionmanager (my Chromebook is booted to ChromeOS at the moment so I cannot quickly check until I finish and save a few thnings). You can also try the commandline via gdisks, or else format it as msdos instead of gpt.

A long-ish reddit thread with some good ideas and links to more nerdy info is here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comme...f_unallocated/









I do wonder how missing a floppy or two worth of space is a nightmare
The graphical representation of the disk layout does make it look like a huge amount of space, to be sure

[Simon]

As I recall a few years ago, I purchased a Scandisk Cruze 32 GB key drive and it has some crud software on it. I recall it took a lot of work and I ended up going in circles but I got the "protected" crud off somehow?? I believe I had to install and use Gparted, if memory serves me.

[woodsmoke]

Simon
yes to your post, Sandisk can be "cheap" but the crud software eats up space.

I use gparted to format it to ext 4 now used to format to FAT.

woodlikesLexarnowsmoke