USB stick formatting compatible for windows reading,
I've been formatting USB sticks ex3 ext4 fat32 fat16 for more than a decade with gparted ...
but I am missing something I'm doing the usual formatting an USB thumb drive msdos partition table. one one fat32 partition but MS Windows machines wont read it It will boot up MX / puppy etc Stick is a genuine Sandisk cruiser 32GB there is no known hidden partition[s] I've tried toggling boot, lba flags on it shrunk the partition still not being read under MS Windows what am I missing? |
from the slackware team
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Take care about which device actually is your USB stick !!! The next |
If you are sure you know what you are doing then dd the drive to zero. (be sure you understand what I mean by be careful)
Then create a mbr partition and format it ntfs. |
I have in the past tried
shred /dev/sdb -n1 -z -v gparted to make a new partition table with one partition they should have done the trick, but no I've tried GPT and MSDOS partition tables with gparted then for example fat32 with flags msfdata, lba and a 2G fat32 partition at the end of the stick with the boot flag. Here is what is working: the big partition being read by windows machines and the fat32 boot partition being used by fatdog64. formatting the stick with one fat32 partition is not being read by windows machines Maybe a stick over a certain size needs a boot partition I seem to have this problem with the 32GB sandisk only. I've checked it and it is not a fake. Hopefully I will remember this process for the next stick I format |
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galen,
Try this procedure to assess the condition of your SanDisk Cruiser USB drive. Install dcfldd: Code:
sudo apt install dcfldd Code:
# dcfldd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=1M Code:
# cmp /dev/zero /dev/sdc If it fails before then, the drive isn't usable any more. My USB drive failed with this output: Code:
akasa username # cmp /dev/zero /dev/sdc |
I'm confused by the mentuion of "booting" Linux from the drive? If you can boot Linux from it tghen, chances are, the Linux distro was dd'd onto it ans contains an ext4 filesystem, surely?
If it's a data drive then I agree, much as it pains me, that NTFS may be the vest choice. Or there's the DVD filesystem I once managed to get working (UDFS?). |
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I wanted to use the stick as data transfer requiring it to be read by windows machines and to have it boot linux I did wipe the drive before with dd and shred tried it with GPT partition table and MSDOS I could format this disk under gparted but win would not read it I could format under win then when I added unetbootin to it win would no longer read it, only when I made 2 partitions would it do both tasks, although w 2 partitions. 1st is used for data transfer fat32, 2nd is used for fatdog64 bootup the OS that I was using was MX linux and it has its own way of partitioning the stick but I did not want a MX boot USB stick |
What you just described is exactly how things should work. You can't use a Linux install partition as storage for Windows since it's going to be a Linux filesystem, so you would need two partitions.
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UDF works, as does ntfs-3g. I believe windows is phasing/has phased out iso9660, as you need to d/l drivers for it on some versions.
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was the partition flagged as lba?
nevermind seen where you already tried that. |
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