This afternooon, I plugged in a usb drive to put a Linux installer on; however, when I opened gparted to format it, gparted gave me the following error "The driver descriptor says the physical block size is 2048 bytes, but Linux says it is 512 bytes".
This is usually caused by accidently using the wrong block size when copying an iso to the drive. This is an annoying problem, but it's rather easy to fix.
The way I fix this problem is to use dd to write the correct block size
back onto the disk and then reformat the drive.
Here is the command I use:
1 | sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<id_of_your_device> bs=2048; sync
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Once this has completed, open gparted. Create a new partition table (gpt or msdos) and create a new partition in the format you wish. Apply the changes and you are done!