Format a Compact Flash Drive While Mounted
 

I have a compact flash drive that I use in a card reader. My system cannot see the card if it is not mounted. But I need to reformat the card from fat16 to ext2. However I cannot format a mounted partion or device. Any ideas?

I am trying to install debian onto my Zaurus 3100, but I just cannot get this CF card formated right. And without ext2, I cannot copy the files extract from this:

http://www.pocketworkstation.org/fil...-big-v0.18.tgz

And follow the instructions here:
http://www.pocketworkstation.org/fil...-big-v0.18.tgz

Can someone help me?

With the flash drive mounted run this as root:

# fdisk -l

that will list all partitions that the system recognizes, whether mounted or not. You should see one for your flash drive, usually /dev/sda if you don't have any sata or scsi hard drives. Next, unmount the flash drive and rerun, fdisk -l. You should still see the entry for your flash drive. To reformat the flash drive to ext2, run:

# mkfs -t ext2 /dev/sdax

where 'x' corresponds to the partition number on the flash drive(usually sda1).

Thank you. That worked.