Hi, atux wrote > > even gparted has it recognised as read only
What exactly did it report ? What permissions are shown with ls -l /dev/sdb Liam O'Toole wrote: > The installer can leave a 'ro' entry for the stick in /etc/fstab. If so, then block device level write operations should succeed. Caution: This test will zeroize partitioning. Do not try if you still want to read the data from the USB stick. (Creating the same partition start and size again would make the filesystem accessible again. It depends on your skills with the partition editor.) The following command will write 512 bytes from /dev/null over the MBR and partition table (where /dev/sdb1 is marked). Afterwards the stick should appear unpartitioned and partition editors should be willing to work. If device file permissions are sufficient. Just make sure that you really address the stick by /dev/sdb, and not your second hard disk. dd if=/dev/null bs=512 count=1 of=/dev/sdb The dd command is about what is proposed for putting a Debian ISO onto USB stick: https://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#write-usb Have a nice day :) Thomas
