Hey all.

I'm an intermediate Linux user, gradually falling more and more in love with the system while working on my Ubuntu 8.10 desktop box. But I recently ran into some trouble with reformatting an IDE hard drive that I'm using to increase the storage I have available.

When I installed the drive and booted the system, I was able to see it, mount it, and access the files that were on it at the time - a Windows XP install that I won't be using any more.

I used gParted to delete the data on the drive, setting up a new partition table for it, starting it from scratch. That process ran properly, and I saw the device in gParted as /dev/sdb, a 500gb drive with its entire contents unallocated.

However, when I attempted to format it to fat32, a single partition using all unallocated space, the process failed, and the drive got flagged as having errors in gParted. I was able to re-clear the partition table, making it all unallocated again, but additional attempts to format it, including attempts with other FS formats, all had the same end result.

Also, fdisk cannot open the device:

I might be missing something that would be obvious to a more experienced *nix user, but I'm not sure what my next step ought to be. I'll greatly appreciate any help I can get.

The details of the error output from gParted are below:

You need to unmount the file system first:

umount /dev/sdb1

If you cannot umount /dev/sdb1 then boot a liveCD and try to format the partition from the liveCD.

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Steve Stites

Thanks for the quick, helpful reply! I believe I've got it set, now.

I tried "sudo umount /dev/sdb" and got a message about sdb not being mounted according to mtab. So I set about preparing to use a Live CD. Only, as the computer was rebooting, I realized that, if mtab didn't see the device as mounted, and fstab didn't either, that a simple reboot should leave the device untouched. So I simply let Ubuntu boot again, ran gParted, and set the partition as I wanted.

Still, it was your advice to use a live CD that got me there, so thanks again!

Just so you know for the future, you needed to specify the partition (1). So the command should have been as jailbait said.

umount /dev/sdb1

The 1 specifies the partition number-- even though there was only one partition you still had to specify it. sdb only specifies the device, which could have many partitions.

Hopefully this gives you a better understanding of how Linux handles drives and partitions. Have fun falling in love with Linux--I am sure you will continue to find it much more useful then other OS's. And someone is generally always here to point you in the right direction when you have questions. I find LQ, and other online forums (along with IRC) quicker and more accurate then calling a helpdesk.