No way to format drives or media

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The best way is to use GParted (Gnome Partition Editor) or fdisk/mkfs (terminal based).

In gparted I get an error dialog :

An error occurred while applying the operations
See the details for more information.

IMPORTANT
If you want support, you need to provide the saved details!
See http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/tips/save_details.htm for more information.

From the saved details :

GParted 0.3.3

Libparted 1.7.1

Format /dev/sdb1 as ntfs 00:00 ( ERROR )

calibrate /dev/sdb1 00:00 ( SUCCES )

path: /dev/sdb1
start: 0
end: 2006672
size: 2006673 (979.82 MiB)
set partitiontype on /dev/sdb1 00:00 ( ERROR )
libparted messages ( INFO )

Unable to open /dev/sdb - unrecognised disk label.

========================================

sdb is a USB keydrive. (Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 1GB)

I like to use the free Russian program MHDD which you can download,burn to a cd,or install on a memory stick,and then boot from this program and erase the whole harddisk.
Also you can scan the surface of your harddisk and see if it's full of bad spots or not,then you can repair them,it's a great program!