How to delete everything from a usb flash drive with ubuntu installed on it?

[computerboy]

Well, the title says it all, but I installed Ubuntu 11.04 on a flash drive and it didn't work very well, and now I want to delete ubuntu from the flash drive but Ubuntu won't mount it. Any Ideas?

[fdrake]

Well, the title says it all, but I installed Ubuntu 11.04 on a flash drive and it didn't work very well, and now I want to delete ubuntu from the flash drive but Ubuntu won't mount it. Any Ideas?

post:


sudo fdisk -l

[C.S.Cameron]

If you did a Live USB and it is formatted FAT then a re-format in Windows or Linux should work.

If you did a Full install and there are multiple partitions, do not format with Windows, it only sees the first partition of a flash drive.

Use gparted, it is available on the Live CD.

[computerboy]

Well, nothing seems to pick the flash drive up. That's the problem.

[efflandt]

If sudo fdisk -l does not show something about it and gparted cannot find it (top menu on left selects which drive), insert it while running a Linux system or live system on install CD or iso on USB, and see what the end of dmesg says about it.

If you accidentally formated the entire flash (like sdb instead of sdb1) instead of a partition, use gparted to create an msdos partition table on it and then whatever partition(s) you want. I have done that more than once when I clicked the wrong thing (drive instead of partition) to format in Startup Disk Creator.