How to format USB drive

[rat007]

Big Fat Guy brought me new USB pendrive. How can I format it? Can I use a different filesystem than FAT32? (EXTx)

[dylunio]

To format it (as root):

fdisk /dev/sda
mkfs -t vfat /dev/sda1

this will make a FAT format od somekind, I'm dot sure which (Ithink FAT32), I'm not suse if you can use something else.

dylunio

[rat007]

Thanx, this did FAT32 formating and now it works just fine. Dunno why but the default filesystem on pendrive was strange and didn't allow me to upload more than 20Megs of data even that it's 256M!

[felipe1982]

This isn't working for me. I have a 128Mb usb drive that i used to use no problems in linux. After a clean install of suse 10.1, I can't seem to write to it (i checked the write protect, and it is off)

when I type fdisk in konsole, this is what I get command not found.

How can I format it? I don't really want it mounted anywhere -- i only wanted it formated in FAT. ps - what is the diff b/w fat and vfat?

[Cabhan]

You need to be root to use fdisk. I would recommend using cfdisk, though, as it is more user-friendly.

VFAT was an extension to FAT16 that allowed long filenames. FAT32 is a version of the FAT filesystem that had a larger drive size limit than FAT16 did.

You can learn more at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table

[felipe1982]

This is what I get at konsole
sudo fdisk
root's password:
sudo: fdisk: command not found

sudo cfdisk
sudo: cfdisk: command not found

[devils casper]

sudo fdisk
root's password:
sudo: fdisk: command not found

use 'su' instead of 'sudo'

su -
fdisk /dev/sda
mkfs -t vfat /dev/sda1

casper

[felipe1982]

# cfdisk

This works beautifully. Thanks everybody.

# parted

Is another very good utility for partitioning free space, and formatting partitions. It has a few more filesystems to chose from compared with cfdisk (most I'll never use, but FAT32 on cfdisk was not compatible with my windows (xp pro SP2) whereas FAT32 in parted worked correctly.)

[devils casper]

Is another very good utility for partitioning free space, and formatting partitions.

you can use GParted. its a front end od 'parted'.





casper

[felipe1982]

the good thing about parted is you don't have to reboot. With GParted, you do. Gparted is much friendlier, though, which is good for me