Hi all. I'm a newbie to the forum, but certainly not to linux. Been using linux since about 2006, and have used more different flavors and distros than I can count. I'm currently using Xubuntu 13.04, and am having an issue that I just can't seem to crack. I have a 16GB Sandisk flash drive that has always been formatted to ext4 and has always worked fine. I formatted it to FAT32 a few weeks ago to allow for compatibility with the computers at my college. But I decided that I want this flash drive at home, and formatted a smaller (4GB) drive to FAT32 for school.

Now comes the issue. The 16GB drive that I replaced with the 4GB drive is still formatted to FAT32, but I want it formatted to ext4. Trouble is, now when I format it to ext4 (via gparted), the computer will recognize it and open it just fine, but it seems to be permanently read-only. Formatting it back to FAT32 fixes the problem and I can save things and delete them to my heart's content. Formatting back to ext4, ext3, or ext2 results in it being "bricked" again.

It bothers me because this flash drive was working fine with the ext4 filesystem before I switched it to FAT32 for school. I have tried changing permissions, changing ownership, wiping the drive and creating a fresh partition table, only to be stuck with the same problem.

Here's an interesting result I got, too: I used gparted to partition the drive with 2 primary partitions, one of them formatted to FAT32, the other, ext4. I did this just to verify that it was, in fact, the ext filesystem I couldn't use. Plugging in the drive after this caused both partitions to correctly mount simultaneously, both correctly displaying the names I gave them in gparted... AND THE SAME PROBLEM PERSISTS!!! I can write to the FAT32 partition just fine, but the ext4 partition is bricked. I have never seen this before, and I'm quite confused, especially considering the fact that I have other flash drives with ext4 that work fine. Hell, the hard drive of the laptop I'm using is ext4.

Any help would be appreciated... If I can't get this fixed, though, I suppose I could simply leave it as FAT32 and turn it into a Porteus or Slax drive.

This is probably a permissions problem.
Format it to ext4
Plug it in, wait until it is mounted, then post the output of
Note you may need to change /media/mountpoint to something like /media/snakeman - it depends on your setup.

1 members found this post helpful.

I've seen this a lot, I get around it by chmoding it when it's mounted.

there are likely 2 partitions
if it reads as dev/sdg1
then you need to reformat in gparted sdg and sdg1

i would just zero out the usb drive using dd
then reformat it using gparted

Look at gparted to see if all the space is used and is being reported correctly?

I like the permission deal too. Might be multiple partitions or simply bad partition or overlay or faulty partition information.