No way to format drives or media

[David Balažic]

Ubuntu 8.04 alpha 4 i386 desktop CD

OK, I give up. How is the user supposed to format things ?

things = { floppy, USB flash/disc/key, optical media, hard drives, etc }

[Iulian Udrea (iulian)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this issue and helping to make Ubuntu better. Examining the information you have given us, this does not appear to be a bug report and subsequently we are closing it and converting it to a question in the support tracker. For help on reporting bugs, see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs . Also you may find it helpful to read "How to report bugs effectively" http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html

[David Balažic (xerces8)]

In the question it was suggested to use gparted, which I did. This is the result (text copied from the question):

In gparted (when I try to format the USB stick) I get an error dialog :

An error occurred while applying the operations
See the details for more information.

IMPORTANT
If you want support, you need to provide the saved details!
See http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/tips/save_details.htm for more information.

From the saved details :

GParted 0.3.3

Libparted 1.7.1

Format /dev/sdb1 as ntfs 00:00 ( ERROR )

calibrate /dev/sdb1 00:00 ( SUCCES )

path: /dev/sdb1
start: 0
end: 2006672
size: 2006673 (979.82 MiB)
set partitiontype on /dev/sdb1 00:00 ( ERROR )
libparted messages ( INFO )

Unable to open /dev/sdb - unrecognised disk label.

========================================

sdb is a USB keydrive. (Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 1GB)