[CS-FSLUG] Hard drive won't format - or maybe stay formatted.

[Karl Kleinpaste]

It's possible that some partition on the drive is being automatically
mounted.  If that's the case, then the kernel's sense of the drive
partitioning is fixed until the last partition is unmounted.  This is
the point where good ol' fdisk(8) mutters, "writing partition table to
disc...re-reading partition table," or something thereabouts.
Basically, you're screwed in such a situation until you convince the
kernel to let go of the last remnant of its belief about the drive.

Qparted won't have any idea that this is the problem; it will know only
that the ioctl() call that attempts to read the table back gives the
same result it used to have.