formatted my usb thumb drive to FAT

Birdman48 · 01-03-2012, 09:26 PM

Hi. I formatted my usb with this command:

Code:

mkfs.vfat /dev/sdc1

(I just wanted to delete everything to make room)

Before, I'd plug it in and Dolphin file manager gui would pick it up and I could see it. Now I can't. It does work as I've got it to mount automatically by putting this into /etc/fstab :

Quote:

/dev/sdc1 /mnt/usbdrive vfat defaults 0 0

I think my distro (openSUSE 11.4) uses a different file system which is why Dolphin wont pick it up.. What file system should I have used to format?

Thanks

jv2112 · 01-04-2012, 04:42 AM

You can try ext4 or ext3 which is pretty common linux filesystems. However, most distros read the filesystem you chose. I would use fdisk and re set up the partitions and then set up vfat filesystem. Something may have gotten damaged and this will start you over from scratch.

Also in the future if you just want to erase the drive you can simply delete all the files.

RockDoctor · 01-05-2012, 06:22 PM

Nothing wrong that I can see with the mkfs.vfat command. With the flash drive inserted, what does

Code:

~$ sudo fdisk /dev/sdc

Command (m for help): p

show for the System? If it shows "Linux", I recommend moving any data on the flash drive you want to keep to another device, then reformatting the flash drive with fdisk, changing the partition type to vfat (hex code b)