Formatting USB memory devices

[Graham Watkins]

On 28/04/12 22:25, David Fletcher wrote:

> This was easy enough to do with Maverick.
>
> I've got a CF card plugged into a USB reader/writer that I want to
> format. The only application I can find that's supposed to do this is
> gnome-format but I can't get it to do anything, or even start up and
> show itself.
>
> How can I do this in 12.04 ?
>
> Dave
>
>
>
The following is pasted from pendrivelinux.com. I've used this method 
before. Assuming that fdisk -l shows your card to be sdx,  there's no 
reason why it shouldn't work for you.

Restoring your USB key to it's original state using Linux:

A. First we need to delete the old partitions that remain on the USB key.

     Open a terminal and type sudo su
     Type fdisk -l and note your USB drive letter.
     Type fdisk /dev/sdx (replacing x with your drive letter)
     Type d to proceed to delete a partition
     Type 1 to select the 1st partition and press enter
     Type d to proceed to delete another partition (fdisk should 
automatically select the second partition)

B. Next we need to create the new partition.

     Type n to make a new partition
     Type p to make this partition primary and press enter
     Type 1 to make this the first partition and then press enter
     Press enter to accept the default first cylinder
     Press enter again to accept the default last cylinder
     Type w to write the new partition information to the USB key
     Type umount /dev/sdx1 (replacing x with your drive letter)

C. The last step is to create the fat filesystem.

     Type mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdx1 (replacing x with your USB key drive 
letter)

That's it, you should now have a restored USB key with a single fat 32 
partition that can be read from any computer.

It's always worked for me,

Cheers,

Graham



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20120429/f3959193/attachment.html>