Flash disk

[Fritz Whittington]

On or about 2004-01-01 20:28, Margo whipped out a trusty #2 pencil and 
scribbled:

> Fritz Whittington wrote:
>
>> On or about 2004-01-01 00:35, Margo whipped out a trusty #2 pencil 
>> and scribbled:
>>
>>> Hi
>>>
>>> Background:
>>>
>>> When I first installed Fedora I plugged in my flash disk and nothing 
>>> happened. I worked on this for 3 days and then finally realised that 
>>> the usb ports weren't working at all. I have since changed the MB 
>>> and they work.
>>>
>>> So. Flash disk no 1 now works.
>>>
>>> Unfortunately Flash disk No 2 got formatted as fat32 to see if that 
>>> would make it work before I found out the usb ports weren't working.
>>>
>>> When I plug it in n ow, it's picked up as a flash disk (good) 
>>> however the filesystem comes up as unknown or not recognised.
>>>
>>> I have searched everywhere to find out the command to reformat the 
>>> disk as vfat in linux... perhaps its too basic a command to be in 
>>> any faq. Can anyone help.
>>>
>> At the command line, type "man mkfs".
>> You probably want to issue:  "mkfs -t msdos /dev/whatever
>>
>> I'm not sure, but I think FAT32 (-t vfat) isn't supported for flash 
>> drives....How did you manage to get it formatted that way in the 
>> first place?
>>
> I formatted the flash disk in WinXP :( at the time I didn't know the 
> MB usb ports on the text computer were stuffed. I tried reformatting 
> using the flash disk utility so the disk is now fat16 in hwbrowser but 
> fedora still gives me the same message.
>
> I tried the mkfs command and got bash: command not found
>
>
You'll  have to be root, and have root's environment (and PATH).  So at 
the command line, type "su -" (without the quotes) and give the root 
password.  Be sure to type "exit" when you finish doing all the 
root-related stuff, to get back to your normal login.

I of course tested my previous advice on my own Linux box, and when I 
"formatted" a 64MB SM card, it came up as FAT12 (using mkfs -t msdos 
/dev/sdc1).  If I format it as FAT16 or FAT32 on Windows, my camera 
won't recognize it when I put it back in.  FAT12 is the Lowest Common 
Denominator, useful on almost any system that supports FAT at all, so 
should probably be used.  I'm pretty sure you could mount and use a 
FAT16 or FAT32 formatted flash drive, but you'd probably have to mount 
it "by hand". 

NOTE:  The "/dev/sdc1" above is for *my* machine.  Yours is probably 
different, most likely /dev/sda[1-4] unless you have some other SCSI 
devices.  The number after the sdx is the partition number, you should 
probably use 1 unless you know a reason to need 2, 3, or 4.  If the card 
auto-mounts when you plug it in (as it might if you have it formatted) 
then you need to unmount it to do the mkfs.  (See "man umount".  Note 
the minssing "n" in "umount".) 



-- 
Fritz Whittington
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope (Aeschylus, Agamemnon)

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