Re: Formatting USB memory devices

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



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