OSX86 Thumb Drive Cannot Be Repartitioned

dudeman41465 · 09-24-2011, 11:45 AM

A friend of mine gave me a thumb drive that he's been unable to fix. He installed OSX on it in an attempt to make a "Hackintosh". Attached is a screenshot of the device's current partition scheme. Any time I try to modify the device's partition scheme it fails. I've tried doing it with GParted and the Gnome Disk Utility (palimpsest), as well as doing the following command as root to try and force a low level format.

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc

The command completed successfully and said that all 8 GB were duplicated, but it didn't actually affect the device.

The type of thumb drive in question is an 8 GB Centon Datastick Pro. There is no write protection measure that I'm aware of on this thumb drive, I have several of them identical to it that are 4 GB and other than two small holes in the end to attach a wrist strap, there are no physical features on the device.

Running dmesg reveals these lines of output, along with a few others, regarding the device /dev/sdc

Code:

[10304.701316] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdc] Add. Sense: Write protected
[10304.701320] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdc] CDB: Write(10): 2a 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 28 00

I've installed hfsutils and all the other hfs programs recommended to me, but even without those you'd think that using dd to do a low level format would wipe the drive regardless of what was on it, but it didn't.

I'm out of solutions for this problem, can any of you guys offer any suggestions?

dudeman41465 · 09-24-2011, 11:50 AM

Update: Just tried using Windows disk management on a friend's Windows PC to delete the partition and I got the following error, "The operation is not supported on removeable media."

dudeman41465 · 09-24-2011, 01:28 PM

Update

In another forum I posted this thread and they referred me to this, which basically details using fdisk to reformat the drive. No luck there. I also installed and tried "parted" and here's what happened.

Code:

root@marcus-laptop:/home/marcus# parted /dev/sdc
GNU Parted 2.3
Using /dev/sdc
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) mktable                                                          
New disk label type? msdos                                                
Warning: The existing disk label on /dev/sdc will be destroyed and all data on
this disk will be lost. Do you want to continue?
Yes/No? Yes                                                               
Error: Input/output error during write on /dev/sdc                        
Retry/Ignore/Cancel?

dudeman41465 · 09-24-2011, 01:33 PM

Update

I booted my Windows XP VM and forwarded the device to that, then went into disk management. It doesn't show the unallocated space or the FAT32 partition, but lists the whole drive as a "GPT Protected Partition". All the right click options were grayed out. I'll be doing research on how to get rid of one of those.

qlue · 09-25-2011, 05:05 PM

Google offers a few options
Try this one
http://www.digital52.com/help/gptremoval.html