8 GB Flash drive formatted at 3.7 GB

[jdow]

From: "Robert Nichols" <rnicholsNOSPAM at comcast.net>
Sent: Tuesday, 2009/December/22 16:37


> Mikkel wrote:
>> On 12/21/2009 03:13 PM, Robert Nichols wrote:
>>> Mikkel wrote:
>>>> Under Linux, you can do both. While you will be asked if that is
>>>> what you really want to do, the tools are happy to let you. Mount
>>>> has no problems mounting /dev/sda if you have formatted /dev/sda.
>>>> (Apposed to formatting /dev/sda1). Windows may not like it, but that
>>>> is another story.
>>> Putting a filesystem on the entire, unpartitioned device is referred
>>> to as "super floppy" or "superfloppy" format.  It's been around, and
>>> supported, since the days of ZIP disks.
>>>
>> My experience with ZIP disks was that if they came formatted, or if
>> you used the Omega formatting tools, they always had one partition.
>> What partition was an indication of what system they were formatted
>> for. Windows was partition 4, Linux was partition 1, and I don't
>> remember what MAC used. (It might not have used a DOS-type partition
>> table.)
> 
> Probably true.  When I was looking for references to "super floppy"
> format (formatting a larger drive in the manner of a floppy disk,
> i.e. without partitioning) that came up as the time that term became
> widely used.  Heck, I'm surprised I even recalled the name.

Bleah - on the Amiga we were formatting them ourselves for real
operating systems. We even had a tool for low level formatting the
drives - any SCSI drive, actually.

{^_-}