[GRLUG] weird USB problem

[John-Thomas Richards]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 06:31:09PM -0500, Matt Behrens wrote:
> 
> On Feb 19, 2013, at 5:51 PM, John-Thomas Richards <jtr at jrichards.org> wrote:
> 
> > How is this even possible?  Am I missing something obvious?  How can a
> > bunch of files still be there after deleting the partition, writing a
> > new partition that utilizes the entire drive, and reformatting that
> > partition?
> 
> I wonder if this has to do with the boot sector trickery I understand
> distros are using now to allow the same image to be used either as
> optical or USB Flash media.  Left something behind that fdisk didn't
> deal with, perhaps?

If the drive is 1GB and my new partition is showing 962MB free, how can
the files from /dev/sdb still be there?  They aren't there when I mount
/dev/sdb1.

> I would try zeroing out the MBR plus a bit and starting again with fdisk:
> 
> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1k

I'll give that a try.
-- 
john-thomas
------
The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the
old ones.
Joseph Joubert (1754-1824)