1 Topic by Edward (edited by Edward 2011-10-24 16:25:22)

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Topic: Trouble Mounting USB & accessing+deleting Partition, Booting from CD

I hope this post is in the correct place.
Apologies if its not.

My problem, i recently brought a NEW "Verbatim 4Gb USB" hence i lost my old, got home plugged it in and found an annoying piece of security software on it that is on a private partition i looked for answers to try and remove this partition, i now have the bootable GParted Live bootable CD, that i have in the CD-rom of my laptop, hours i have been looking how to mount my usb so it is recognised for when i scan for devices and so i can delete the partition but i have had no luck in doing so.

I am very new to this and have no real idea, of commands i have looked around and come across a number of different variations of fdisk and such as and tried them all, but alot of them come back as permission denied, am i missing somethign am i suppos eto change to root and if so how can i do that? i would be very grateful if someone could help me.

I tried the command below and i got a lot of information and located my USB stick i think but had no clue what information i should use to actually mount it.

dmesg | grep scsi -A 3

Any information on this i would be grateful.

2 Reply by gedakc

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Re: Trouble Mounting USB & accessing+deleting Partition, Booting from CD

Would you be able to provide the output from the following two commands?

fdisk -l -u

where one of the options is a lower case "L" and not the number one.

parted /path-to-your-device unit s print

where /path-to-your-device is something like /dev/sda.

3 Reply by Edward

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Re: Trouble Mounting USB & accessing+deleting Partition, Booting from CD

gedakc wrote:

Would you be able to provide the output from the following two commands?

fdisk -l -u

where one of the options is a lower case "L" and not the number one.

parted /path-to-your-device unit s print

where /path-to-your-device is something like /dev/sda.

Typed in:
fdisk -l -u
parted /dev/sda

WARNING: You are not a superuser. Watch out or permissions.
Error: Error opening /dev/sda: Permission Denied.
Retry/Cancel?

Sorry thats all i got and im not sure about the path for my pendrive.

4 Reply by class413

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Re: Trouble Mounting USB & accessing+deleting Partition, Booting from CD

You can try adding

sudo

in head of each command.

About the path of the pendrive: you can look at the hard drive selection window in GParted sceen, to look for the drives it detects. Look for a drive of 4GB or about 3.75GiB. It will be something like /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, ...

The fdisk command without any path would display info on all detected hard drive devices.

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

5 Reply by Edward

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Re: Trouble Mounting USB & accessing+deleting Partition, Booting from CD

class413 wrote:

You can try adding

sudo

in head of each command.

About the path of the pendrive: you can look at the hard drive selection window in GParted sceen, to look for the drives it detects. Look for a drive of 4GB or about 3.75GiB. It will be something like /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, ...

The fdisk command without any path would display info on all detected hard drive devices.

The only hardrives that have been located through the Gparted own search program are th ones that are part of my laptops main hardrive, nothing to do with my pendrive has been located.

The USB stick software might not be recognised at all because when i used it the normal way, it recognises the software first as a CD/rom in my computer. It wont let anything access its other "storage partition" till a apssword has been created or put in and accepted.

The partitions so far that have been located by the software are as follows.

/dev/sda1 fat32 RECOVERY 19.53Gib Flags = hidden, lba
/dev/sda2 ntfs OS 116.44Gib Flags = boot
/dev/sda3 extended 329.79Gib Flags = lba
/dev/sda5 ntfs DATA 329.79Gib Flags = None
Unallocated unallocated 1.02Mib Flags = None

This is all that is in GUI
Funny thing is i only have 500Gib hardrive so its sounds kind of wrong to me but i didnt want to touch it in case, also the only one that is really odd one out there is the unallocated, could that be to do with the usb or just unsused space...

Will retry those commands with sudo now.

Thanks

By the way i am getting user@debian is that correct or should it be root@debian ?

6 Reply by Edward

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Re: Trouble Mounting USB & accessing+deleting Partition, Booting from CD

Just tried the sudo fdisk -l -u

Disk /dev/sfa: 500GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 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: 0xe0c6913d

Device Boot           Start             End                          Blocks                    Id        System
/dev/sda1                   63           40965749            20482843+               lc          HIDDEN W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2       40965750         285153245            122093748               7          HPFS/NTFA/exFAT
/dev/sda3     285153280         976771071            345808896               f         W95 Ext'd )LBA)
/dev/sda5     285155328         976771071            345807872               7         HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

results from

sudo fdisk -l -u

7 Reply by gedakc

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Re: Trouble Mounting USB & accessing+deleting Partition, Booting from CD

To try to determine the device entry (/dev/sdZ) for the usb drive, first boot gparted and open a terminal window.  Then plug in the usb drive, wait for 10 seconds, and then issue the following command in the terminal window:

dmesg

The last several lines of this command normally show the device that was attached and the device entry that was assigned to it.

8 Reply by Edward

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Re: Trouble Mounting USB & accessing+deleting Partition, Booting from CD

gedakc wrote:

To try to determine the device entry (/dev/sdZ) for the usb drive, first boot gparted and open a terminal window.  Then plug in the usb drive, wait for 10 seconds, and then issue the following command in the terminal window:

dmesg

The last several lines of this command normally show the device that was attached and the device entry that was assigned to it.


Last 9 lines as follows not including time taken stamp

scsi 7:0:0:0 Direct Access Verbatim Secure Dta USB PMAP PQ

: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS

scsi 7:0:0:1 CR-ROM Verbatim Secure Dta USB PMAP PQ

: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS

sd 7:0:0:0 Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0

sd 7:0:0:0 [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

srl: scsi3-mmc drive: 0x/0x writer tray

sr 7:0:0:1 Attached scsi CD-ROM sr1      <<<< pretty sure it was a 1 at the end

sr 7:0:0:1 [sdb] Attached scsi generic sg3 type 5

9 Reply by gedakc

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Re: Trouble Mounting USB & accessing+deleting Partition, Booting from CD

That is really odd.  I have never seen anything quite like that before whereby a USB flash device is detected as a CD-ROM.  I have no idea what is going on in this circumstance.

10 Reply by Edward

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Re: Trouble Mounting USB & accessing+deleting Partition, Booting from CD

gedakc wrote:

That is really odd.  I have never seen anything quite like that before whereby a USB flash device is detected as a CD-ROM.  I have no idea what is going on in this circumstance.

As i said it has some stupid software on it that i have failed to get of repeatedly, its a private partition that runs as a CD-ROM when you first plug it in and once you give your password it then lets you into the main partition, the software pre installed is called EasyLock

http://www.verbatim.com/index/support.p … p;pid=5451

All i know it is FAT32 and cant touch that private partition.....

11 Reply by Edward

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Re: Trouble Mounting USB & accessing+deleting Partition, Booting from CD

In the end i returned it to the shop, and they couldn't even remove the software.

Thank you for all your help, shame we couldn't crack it.

12 Reply by class413

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Re: Trouble Mounting USB & accessing+deleting Partition, Booting from CD

I guess it has to do with the pen drive firmware.

it recognises the software first as a CD/rom in my computer

Looking for this Verbatim "story", I found several reports on this point.
http://www.ehow.com/how_6025793_hidden- … drive.html

A read-only partition on a flash drive may show up in the "CD-Rom" area.

http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t … moval.html

It comes with antivirus software preinstalled in a hidden partition
which automatically presents itself as a separate CDROM drive when I
plug the flash drive in.

I found a suggestion in that thread in Ubuntu forums to use the dd command to "zero" the entire drive, but I wonder how, as it isn't detected as drive device.  roll 

I only found a suggestion to use the mswindows dedicated software to set the "safe" partition size to 0, however this doesn't mean that the partition is automaticaly removed. However, this implies the use of a mswindows system with the specific software installed.

http://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/USB_Device … ility_List
It shows a few more ways to check how a usb drive is detected. Perhaps you can give a try, if you still keep the device.


Finally, I found that giving 10 times a wrong password in an "EasyLock" Verbatim pendrive will cause a "safe" deletion of the securely stored files. I found it rather silly, because we store files to the device to have them securely stored, not to have them lost for sure!

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

13 Reply by Edward

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Re: Trouble Mounting USB & accessing+deleting Partition, Booting from CD

Thank you for all your help, in the end i took it to the store and the techy there though he would have a go, bur even he failed, to be honest think Gparted had more chance i looked at the links you supplied nothing concrete i dont think unfortunately its not in my possession any more so i cant test it.

Would of been nice to conquer it thank you anyways, lets hope i get something else to partition because dparted is a great program.