[wplug] Gparted destroyed my new WD Passport

[Patrick Wagstrom]

Scott F. Kiesling wrote:
> Tried it, didn't work. Unplugged and tried again. Definition
> of insanity I know, but then:
> 
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
> dd: writing to `/dev/sda': No space left on device
> 512409+0 records in
> 512408+0 records out
> 262352896 bytes (262 MB) copied, 3.78296 s, 69.4 MB/s
> 
> Great (but is the '262 Mb cause for concern?), so on to fdisk:
> 
> 
> miles temp # fdisk /dev/sda
> Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor
> Sun, SGI or OSF disklabel
> Building a new DOS disklabel. Changes will remain in memory
> only,
> until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the
> previous
> content won't be recoverable.

Scott,

Is there anything coming up in your system log when you plug in the 
device and try to access it?  You can this by doing "dmesg | tail -n 
100" to get the last 100 lines.  I had a very similar problem at the 
last installfest and eventually I needed to boot into windows to fix the 
drive and upgrade the firmware because Linux's USB stack was having 
problems with the old broken firmware.

I'm not saying you have the same problem, but messages in your dmesg 
output might be helpful to figure out what's going on.

--Patrick