[SOLVED] unwanted partition of flash drive

[querent]

Victory. Blessed be. And know I know of the existence of DBAN (hehehe...)

/dev/sdb
/dev/sdc

both still show up when the drive is in, but, after formating /dev/sdb via gparted, only it automounts. and the other appears to be size 0.

had to use the beta version of DBAN. and viman to get back write permissions (even after chown, chgrp...had to do this back before my last reinstall of ubuntu too, so this was not a surprise).

So, thanks again.