linuxgeek: Re: [LINUX_Newbies] Formatting Flash Drives

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Re: [LINUX_Newbies] Formatting Flash Drives

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Darksyde wrote:
> Ok, here's the deal: I bought a couple of 8 Gig flash drives from
> SanDisk for a great price but, of course, they have the proprietary
> s'ware ("U3"). I managed to delete part of it but there's still a few
> megs of stuff that I would like to discard also to be on the safe
> side. Plenty of room for storage but I want to create bootable
> drives so here goes: 1. How do I go about totally formatting the
> drive? As is, it won't let me set permissions which should let me
> delete anything there. 2. Assuming it's possible, what file system
> should I reformat to (VFAT, Ext3, etc)? It will _probably_ only be
> booted from Linux machines. 3. Obviously, with 8 G's I want to
> create a persistent drive so how do I add this option, or is there an
> .iso for flash drives with persistence available? I want to use Ubu
> 9.10 and add Ubuntu Studio (in case that's relevant). Thanks, Mark
> (still in love with Felicia)
>

I use fdisk.

first I su to root, then I

# /sbin/fdisk /dev/sdc

(for the third SCSI disk, in this example)

Then, once I am in fdisk, I would use the instructions fdisk provides,
to delete all partitions.

Then, I would create whatever new partitions I wanted.

Then, I would write the changes to disk.

Then, I would exit fdisk, and run mkfs on each partition I had created,
to format the new partitions in the filesystems of my choice.

Just make sure you select the correct device, or you might nuke the
wrong partitions. :)

Also... fdisk will not work unless you use /dev/[whatever]
If /dev/[whatever] mounts at /mnt/usb1, and you try using:

# /sbin/fdisk /mnt/usb1 ...it won't work, it will just give you an error
message.

- --
- -wittig
http://www.robertwittig.com/
http://robertwittig.net/
http://robertwittig.org/
.
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