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I have 4GB pendrive. while trying to formatting, it gives Write protected message. The pendrive is not having write protection notch. I have tried is on Windows as well as on Fedora 13.

cfdisk & fdisk or mkfs; nothing is working they are giving the same message that could not format write protected drive.

Disk /dev/sdb: 4016 MB, 4016046080 bytes
90 heads, 25 sectors/track, 3486 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2250 * 512 = 1152000 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000ae90f

Device     Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           4        3487     3917824    b  W95 FAT32


cfdisk /dev/sdb
Opened disk read-only - you have no permission to write

sudo tune2fs -l /dev/sdb
tune2fs 1.41.9 (22-Aug-2009)
tune2fs: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sdb
Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock.
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The issue above seems to be that you're trying to use an e2fs tool (tune2fs) on a device that contains a single VFAT file system. Before we go any further, could you say whether you want a vfat or an e2fs filesystem on the USB stick? Could you also say if you get the same write error when you do sudo cfdisk /dev/sdb1? – MadHatter Dec 4 '10 at 8:43
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migrated from serverfault.com Dec 6 '10 at 8:15

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2 Answers

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Try this 

umount /dev/sdb
fdisk /dev/sdb
mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdb
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If you're creating a partition and trying to format the partition, then the command needs to be mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdb1 (or whatever partition number it is you made) – DerfK Dec 4 '10 at 13:04
I have tried mkfs too, but the message i'm getting in syslog is that, Bad magic number, & drive is mounting read only. & the drive doesnt having write protection notch. I can still copy data from the drive but formatting & deletion is not possible. – bvishal4u Dec 7 '10 at 12:53
cant able to fdisk or sfdisk also. – bvishal4u Dec 7 '10 at 12:53
I think superblock is currupted, how to recover from backup superblock. – bvishal4u Dec 7 '10 at 13:05
Thanks, ubuntu@ubuntu-Latitude-D510:~$ sudo mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdb mkfs.vfat 3.0.9 (31 Jan 2010) mkfs.vfat: unable to open /dev/sdb Still the problem is same of "could not open write protected drive" – bvishal4u Dec 9 '10 at 11:30
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up vote 0 down vote

When I had some problems with the usb pendrive formatting, I used the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool for Windows. Depending on the size of the pendrive, it can take minutes to perform the operation. I hope this can help to solve your problem.

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