How can I wipe a "Read only" flash drive?

[esos]

https://flashboot.ru/files/

[bigpup]

Have to ask this.

Have you tried plugging the USB stick into different USB ports?

Even on different computers?

[tosim]

@bigpup Yes-with same results-Nada. Thanks for asking though.

[bigpup]

If you used Ventoy to install something on these drives.

By default, Ventoy select exFAT filesystem for the main partition to hold iso files.

Puppy Linux does not come with support for the exfat file system(format)

Did you ever try this?

Do this from a running newer Puppy version and running normal as root user.
So You are using a newer version of Gparted and have full root ability.

First make sure desktop drive icon for the USB is showing it is not mounted.
If it is mounted.
Unmount it.

Use Gparted to get back to normal setup.
Select the USB stick as device to work on.

Make a new partition table
GParted > Device > Create Partition Table > MS-DOS

This will wipe clean all partitions and data on disk.
End up with unallocated space.

Make a partition and format it fat32.

If does not work.
What error messages do you get?

[peppyy]

Can't thank you enough for this post. Saved 2 of my usb 3.0 drives. Now I should be able to use one to put my working copy of fossa64 on it to tweak.

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If still no good, may have to first do this and then use Gparted.
In a terminal (console)
Be very careful to identify the USB stick in dev/sd part of command.
In this example it is sdb (desktop drive icons. Should be one for the USB giving it's label sdb, sdc, sdd, etc.......)

Code: Select all

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M count=1

This basically deletes everything on the drive and writes all zeros on it.