Windows Can't see linux drive

[kishki]

I am pretty new to Linux so I'm posting in the newbee forum.

I have some USB drives that have been written to and formatted using CentOS with a command such as this one:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc bs=1024

I want to format one and use on Vista and then return it to a Linux format.

But when I plug it into Vista, Vista recognizes it and installs the drivers for it but it does not show up in "My Computer" or when trying to navigate to it in the command window. (cmd)

How can I get Vista to see it so I can format it for Vista and then How can I return it to Linux so that the dd command will write to it properly?

Thanks in advance!
Kishki

[b2bwild]

You cant create partition using "dd" command. You can copy from one drive to another drive of same size and type.

after that you have to format newly created partition with filesystem.

[i92guboj]

I am pretty new to Linux so I'm posting in the newbee forum.

I have some USB drives that have been written to and formatted using CentOS with a command such as this one:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc bs=1024

I want to format one and use on Vista and then return it to a Linux format.

But when I plug it into Vista, Vista recognizes it and installs the drivers for it but it does not show up in "My Computer" or when trying to navigate to it in the command window. (cmd)

Just format them from linux. Windows will not see linux partitions, so you would first need to use partition magic or equivalent software to erase or reformat the partitions.

From linux you can just use mkfs.vfat -F 32 for fat32 or mkfs.ntfs for ntfs.

then How can I return it to Linux so that the dd command will write to it properly?

Thanks in advance!
Kishki

You don't need to return the drive to linux or anything like that. dd doesn't even operate at filesystem level, so the fs is irrelevant. It just overwrites the disk with whatever byte sequence you feed it with. The fs is inside the image file itself (hopefully). So, the disk state once you use dd again on it will the an 1:1 copy of the original state, byte-by-byte, including the fs metadata and even the garbage present on the free space (dd doesn't know about free space, it just reads the disk, not files and dirs).

[pmcoleman]

I use a number of flash drives. For those that need to be used across different OS platforms, I always use vfat formatting and partitions. If I know that one will never need to be used on windows, I will occasionally format it to ext3. Regardless, I always use Linux to format the drives, with the exception of a couple of times when I used PartitionMagic in a windows machine to format a drive to Linux. I did not have access to a Linux box at the time.