Comment 35 for bug 458334

Ubuntu 9.10 (32 bit)

I second ruffneckc's vote for the phedon post earlier.

This exactly described my problem, and was the solution that worked for me, for example:

sudo mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdb1

Formatted the USB flash drive.

Then I was able to select the volume not marked with an exclamation mark, set my size for stored data as 1Gb and away she goes!

Thanks for the original poster phedon's contribution.