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Bad Magic Number in Super-Block when formatting a USB Pen Drive

Hi everyone,

New to the forums but I've been using linux for several months...What brings me here today is the need for help formatting a usb pen drive via terminal. I have gparted installed in my machine, and that works just fine, however, I'd like to start leaning more towards using the terminal to get things done. I'm running linux Mint Maya.

So, these are my commands and associated error codes:

Quote:

sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdb1

then:

Quote:

sudo e2label /dev/sdb1 usb-8-gig

which gives me the error code:

Quote:

e2label: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sdb1
Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock.

I'm at a loss. I've tried several different drives and they all give me the same error code, so what am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance!

mkdosfs - create an MS-DOS file system under Linux

e2label - Change the label on an ext2 filesystem

My guess that the version can't create a label on a fat format.

okay, so how can I fix the problem? Sorry if it's not immediately evident to me.