I have one thumb drive that mounts different than the others.

This drive, whenever I plug it into a USB slot will then produce
3 icon targets on my display.

Other thumb drives will only produce one target. Example, if I plug
in a thumb drive with the name of PURPLE, an icon will show up on my
X window display that is idenified as PURPLE.

The problem drive is named KICK, but this one produces 3 icons when
plugged in, the icons are named--> KICK, 538 MB Voiume, 16 GB Volume.

I am using ubuntu 20.04, gdm3 the standard gnome window manager.
The offending usb drive is a PNY 16GB.

None of my other thumbdrives do this, they all just produce one icon.

I have tried reformatting the drive, both with windows format
and linux format programs, and still get the problem.


Can anyone explain this?

Looks like it has two partitions, the size of the smaller one suggests a UEFI partition.

If this is just for file storage, you can re partition it to just have one partition, & put a new file system onto it.

It sounds as if the thumbdrive has already been formatted and perhaps two of the partitions have been doctored in the hardware to by read-only. Look at the drive with a disk partition program and see what file systems the partitions are and whether they are read-only or read-write. gparted would be good since it is GUI and will be very obvious. You say you have tried reformatting but not what you did to do so. If, in fact, there are three partitions you will have to unmount each partition and delete it. Once that is done so all the space is unallocated then you can partition and format the way you wish. If, as I suspect, the first two partitions have been set read-only in the hardware at the factory I know of nothing you can do without some rather expensive equipment, if then.

1 members found this post helpful.

agillator, sounds like you may have the answer there. I have fooled with the drive pretty extensively so far with nothing helping. I will try to run down this gparted and see if it is the answer.

EldonCool, I don't know about slackware but other distributions have gparted in their various repositories so if you don't have it you should be able to find it easily. There was a time I would not buy a WD external drive because they insisted on loading stuff I could not get to and get rid of so I know it happens. I don't think they do it any more but I know it can happen. I also know I will never knowingly purchase such a device. If it turns out it is hardware, I would contact PNY and see what they have to say. Make sure they understand you will not buy any more of their products if they continue. I have bought PNY before and not had a problem, by the way.

I am using ubuntu at present, and I might have fixed it with your help.

I tried gparted, could not find my drive / sdc
looking at site for gparted they mentioned program testdrive
installed that one, and after some fooling around found /dev/sdc
and eliminated the partition table.

Now system does not recognize the drive when it is plugged in.
Tried to reformat with windows 10 computer, it cant find the drive either.

Then ran gparted with this command --> sudo gparted /dev/sdc
after quite a bit of fooling around created an ext4 partition.
I wanted to do fat 16 partition but it would only let me use 4MB for that,
so I went with ext4 and got about 16GB.

Now when I plug it in, I only get ONE icon, yea! But it is an ext4
partition, will other systems, Mac and Windows computers, recognize it?

So I take the thumb drive and plug it in the windows-10 machine, and it
tells me I have to format it. It is drive F: according to windows.
So I format f:
Yep, it gives me 15G of msdos drive.

Now I plug it in ubuntu machine, yep it finds it, and as only one drive.

Success.

Great! If at first you don't succeed, get a bigger hammer! Sometimes you just have to keep screwing with things until the systems get so confused they just give up.

For future reference, to put a vfat filesystem onto a disk using Linux....