# [RESOLVED] Messed up partitions on a USB 3.0 drive?

## AaylaSecura

I recently bought a 32GB USB 3.0 drive, which I plug into a USB 2.0 port. It came formatted with FAT32, so I wanted to format it into NTFS as I did with my previous (USB 2.0) drive. When I plugged it in, though, and opened GParted I got an error that it can't read the conents of the filesystem and bla bla can't proceed. Furthermore fdisk showed:

```
Disk /dev/sdb: 31.6 GB, 31608274944 bytes, 61734912 sectors

Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

Disk identifier: 0x6e697373

This doesn't look like a partition table

Probably you selected the wrong device.

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System

/dev/sdb1   ?  1936269394  3772285809   918008208   4f  QNX4.x 3rd part

/dev/sdb2   ?  1917848077  2462285169   272218546+  73  Unknown

/dev/sdb3   ?  1818575915  2362751050   272087568   2b  Unknown

/dev/sdb4   ?  2844524554  2844579527       27487   61  SpeedStor
```

In comparison the output for my old drive was:

```
Disk /dev/sdb: 8015 MB, 8015314944 bytes, 15654912 sectors

Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

Disk identifier: 0x00078dd7

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System

/dev/sdb1   *          32    15654911     7827440    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
```

I thought it's because I don't have support for FAT32, although that shouldn't matter if I'm reformatting it. I said nevermind, I'll convert it to NTFS from Windows. Windows mounted it automatically like any other removable media, detected it's FAT32. I used the 'convert' command to convert it to NTFS without format and tried it on Gentoo again. Same error: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30726682/usb3-parted.png

same fdisk output. I looked in /dev and the only new device that appeared when I plugged the drive was /dev/sdb, no sdb1, sdb2.. etc. With my old drive there was sdb1, which I was mounting. I tried it on a Live CD of Kubuntu and the fdisk and parted outputs were the same. Nevertheless I let Dolphin mount it using its default options and it did mount it:

```
/dev/sdb on /media/Transcend type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=512)
```

So I switched back to Gentoo and tried to simply mount /dev/sdb and it worked - I can read and write to the drive. However, I'd like to be able to reformat it or even partition it. Could the drive be faulty?

P.S. Here are the outputs of lsusb and /var/log/messages for the two drives:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30726682/usb3-lsusb

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30726682/usb2-lsusb

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30726682/usb3-messages

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30726682/usb2-messagesLast edited by AaylaSecura on Tue Jul 09, 2013 2:58 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## chithanh

It appears that the filesystem was created directly on the disk, and not inside a partition. So there is no partition table for fdisk/parted to handle.

To partition it, overwrite the first 1 MB or so with zeroes (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M count=1, be careful with that command as all data on the drive will be lost), then fdisk/parted should stop complaining.

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## AaylaSecura

 *chithanh wrote:*   

> It appears that the filesystem was created directly on the disk, and not inside a partition. So there is no partition table

 

I didn't even know that can work   :Embarassed: 

Thanks a lot, it's fixed!

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