[clug] fdisk :"Unable to write to /dev/sdb"

[Eyal Lebedinsky]

On 19/08/15 17:20, Stephen Hodgman wrote:
> G'day All,
> I have two Seagate 2TB Backup Plus USB 3 drives that I use for backup on
> a CentOS 5 system.
> When I received them I used fdisk to remove the NTFS partition and
> created a Linux partition.
> I then formated as ext3 and they are working fine.
>
> Today I purchased another drive, the box was basically the same, the
> drive case was slightly different but it was still 2TB.
> I used fdisk, deleted the partion, created a linux partition, pressed
> "w" to save it and it responded
> "Unable to write to /dev/sdb".  The NTFS partition remains on the disk.
>
> The device it not write protected.  I wrote to it with the NTFS partition.
> When it loads, /var/log/messages says "Write protection is off"
> The only real difference that I can see is that this new drive logs as
> New Disk:
> SCSI device sdb: 488378645 4096-byte hdwr sectors
> Old (working) Disk:
>   SCSI device sdb: 3907029167 512-byte hdwr
>
> They both multiply to 2TB but is there an issue with 4096 sectors?
> Or, does anyone have a suggestions as to why fdisk will not write
> partitioning to the disk?

Any other info in /var/log/messages?

As I recall these days partitions start further on, like sector 2048.
It used to be much earlier. But I remember fdisk automatically starting the first
partition in this higher location. If your did not do this for you then try that.

Eyal

> Thanks.

-- 
Eyal Lebedinsky (eyal at eyal.emu.id.au)