format thumb drive

Sat Mar 13 19:03:57 UTC 2010

It would appear that on Mar 13, William Biggs did say:

> On 03/13/2010 03:26 AM, Amedee Van Gasse wrote:
> > Please do not hijack the thread.
> > Hijacking = reply to an existing thread, with a totally different topic.
> > If you have a new question, start a new email. Not a reply, a new email.

> I thought I did sorry ?

Mistakes happen William... Were you aware that whether your E-mail client shows
them to you or not, E-mail messages contain special headers like "Message-ID:",
"References:", & "In-Reply-To:" which are used to link messages together in a
"threaded" tree like structure? 

Simply clearing the "Subject:" header line doesn't unlink a reply from the message
thread it was in reply to. And since many of the "experts" in tech help lists use a
threaded view, they might never see your message if they don't find the parent
thread interesting enough to open...

It would appear that previously on Mar 13, William Biggs did say:

> I need to know how to format my thumb drive ?

I'll tell you what I know. But first I gotta say that I strongly dislike
any removable media ever being automatically mounted, played, or fed to
burner software, just because it's been inserted into my computer. So I go
to great lengths to ensure that my Linux doesn't do that. So if yours
automatically does the above you may need to take additional *steps that I
don't know about...

(*probably just telling some file manager such as Thunar to unmount it again...) 

This method assumes your using a command shell with admin privileges so you might want
to open an xterm or konsole and type the command:

sudo bash

Or you could just type "sudo" before each of the following commands..."

Type the command:

fdisk -l

(note that "l" is a lower case L NOT a number 1)

If you only have one hard drive, it will likely be "/dev/sda" And your
thumb drive will likely be "/dev/sdb"... But that varies from one Linux
distro to another. And since I'm running Elive at the moment, in the
example below my laptop's hard drive is "/dev/hda", which leaves "/dev/sda"
available for the thumb drive I just plugged in...

----- Snip line [begin example]
# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x4573c650

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        3452    27728158+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2            3453        4256     6458130    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda3            4257        4378      979965   83  Linux
/dev/hda4            4379       14594    82060020    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5            4379        6445    16603146   83  Linux
/dev/hda6            6446        8512    16603146   83  Linux
/dev/hda7            8513       10579    16603146   83  Linux
/dev/hda8           10580       10944     2931831   83  Linux
/dev/hda9           10945       11430     3903763+  83  Linux
/dev/hda10          11431       12159     5855661   83  Linux
/dev/hda11          12160       14469    18555043+  83  Linux
/dev/hda12          14470       14593      995998+  82  Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sda: 525 MB, 525336576 bytes
2 heads, 63 sectors/track, 8143 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 126 * 512 = 64512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00365879

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        8144      513008    6  FAT16

----- Snip line [end example]

As you can see my hard drive has 12 partitions (including the extended)
And this thumb drive only has 1.

Assuming I don't need to repartition the thumb drive I could format it's one
partition with mkfs. If I simply wanted a fresh slate that was still compatible
with most windows computers, Then (AFTER MAKING SURE THE THUMB DRIVE ISN'T MOUNTED)
I'd type this command:

mkfs -t vfat /dev/sda1

Note: as I mentioned above On YOUR Kubuntu that's more likely to be /dev/sdb1
(That's why you do the "fdisk -l" to list the attached drive/partitions...)

If I didn't care about windows connectivity, and I wanted Linux file
permission and ownership to remain intact on the data I stored on it I
might format it with

mkfs -t ext2 /dev/sda1

Hope this helps!

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