On October 7, 2009 10:30:23 pm Mick wrote: > What's the best way to reformat a USB stick?
The thing about USB sticks is that if you want to use them to transfer files cross-platform (Windows & Mac as well as Linux) you have to use a common filesystem. Typically, I use FAT32 for this since I don't think Windows supports anything else that Linux and Mac can both deal with (NTFS support in Linux is still unavailable on most machines) So, if you're going to go with FAT32, you can use fdisk to partition your stick as usual, and mark it as type "b" (Win95 FAT32) (there's a few options related to FAT32 in there, but I *think* that that's the right one). Write to the stick and exit fdisk. Then when you're back at the prompt, run: # mkfs.vfat /dev/sda1 ...if sda is in fact your key. You can even add "-L LabelName" to attach a label to the stick: # mkfs.vfat -L "USB Stick" /dev/sda1 I'm pretty sure spaces are ok there... If not, nuke the space ;-)
