Format a bootable USB key
This post is mostly a remainder for me as it struggles me every time 😜. After making a USB key bootable with any distribution, I get an error message when I want to format it with a graphical interface (tested with gnome-disk, kde partition manager and gparted).
This is the steps I have to do to be able to modify this USB key using one of the graphical interfaces I listed.
Identify the USB key name on your system
First type the following command:
lsblk
It gives you an output like this:
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 1 28,7G 0 disk
└─sda1 8:1 1 28,6G 0 part /media/vincent/Kde Neon
nvme0n1 259:0 0 126,9G 0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 512M 0 part /boot/efi
└─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 126,4G 0 part /
Here, my bootable key has the name sda.
Fill the USB key with zeros
Be careful on this part, it can harm your system if you do it wrong!
Now you have to type the following command and replace /dev/sda
by /dev/<your usb name>
.
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4k conv=fsync && alert
Now you can use your favorite graphical interface to format your key.
The && alert
command is not necessary. If you want to understand what it is, I suggest you to look at my post about my bash configuration.
Hope it helps some of you, it surely helps me 😄.
Cheers, Vincent.