Lately I've been using a USB drive to boot on various versions of Ubuntu to install Ubuntu on a computer.

The problem after that is trying to use that USB drive on a MS-Windows computer. Apparently Windows does not recognizes the format and thus decides that the drive is ready-only. As a result, you cannot do anything, not even format the drive1.

Now, even under Ubuntu, I have had problems to reformat the drive. There is the Nautilus environment. Mine does not even open a window when I select the Format... menu entry (when you right click on a thumb drive, that's one of the options).

So instead, I tried the Disk utilities. That shows me the drive and its existing partitions. It gives me the option to format a partition, which fails anyway, but that's not what I want to do... I don't want to keep those partitions. Instead, I want to reformat the drive as a whole to a FAT32 drive, which is compatible with MS-Windows.

So finally I tried with GParted. That gives me a drive and the ability to format the whole thing as whatever disk type Linux supports (that's a really long list! including FAT32). But that too fails. Hmm...

Looking at the error messages (you have to open the log window and then open at least the part that has a red marker), I noticed something that says "mounted" or something like that. Ah. I have to unmount first. Of course.

I did that manually. In my case, it uses /dev/sdh1 and /dev/sdh4. So I used the following two commands:

umount /dev/sdh1
umount /dev/sdh4

and tried the format in GParted again. This time it worked! I again have a FAT32 thumb drive. Cool!

• 1. Okay, there is most certainly some tools one can use to reformat that USB drive even under MS-Windows. I just don't know enough about that OS to tell.