Label and Format USB Drive

carlosinfl · 06-16-2010, 01:20 PM

I have a USB thumb drive that I just partitioned using the 'fdisk' utility in Linux. Now I am trying to learn the command that will allow me to format the drive as 'fat32' while also setting the disk label on the device as "ocz_usb" when the drive gets mounted. Does anyone know the command I would use that will format the USB drive and properly set the disk label at the same time?

MS3FGX · 06-16-2010, 02:09 PM

The command would be something like:

Code:

mkdosfs -n ocz_usb /dev/device

Where device would be whatever your flash drive is (say, /dev/sda). Depending on the size of the drive, you might also want to use the "-F" option to enable 32 bit mode, as my understanding is that this is still set to 16 bit by default.

carlosinfl · 06-16-2010, 02:14 PM

I don't understand why my Linux system is telling me that it doesn't exist:

Code:

[root@tuna ~]# mkdosfs -F 32 -n oczusb /dev/sdd1
mkdosfs 3.0.9 (31 Jan 2010)
/dev/sdd1: No such file or directory

I know it's there because I see it 'dmesg' and I can format it with the 'fdisk' utility.

Code:

usb 1-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 6
scsi10 : usb-storage 1-4:1.0
scsi 10:0:0:0: Direct-Access     OCZ      CROSS OVER       0.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
sd 10:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg5 type 0
scsi 10:0:0:1: Direct-Access     OCZ      SD0StorageDevice 0.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdd] 15794176 512-byte logical blocks: (8.08 GB/7.53 GiB)
sd 10:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg6 type 0
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdd] Mode Sense: 00 00 00 00
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 10:0:0:1: [sde] Attached SCSI removable disk
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
 sdd:
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI removable disk

MS3FGX · 06-16-2010, 03:36 PM

That log output shows that while it detects the drive itself, it doesn't see any partitions on it. So that would seem to indicate there was a problem when you partitioned it with fdisk. Try something like the following, and see what it lists:

Code:

fdisk -l /dev/sdd