Formatting Flash drives / thumb drives

lawrence_lee_lee · 06-10-2008, 04:39 AM

I'd like to format my thumb drive, of course on a linux machine, but I want it to also be readable on windows machine. So I tried the following:

Quote:

sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdb1

But it turn out that the thumb drive cannot be mounted after formatting, showing the following error message.

Quote:

mount:/dev/sdb1:can'tread superblock

What mistakes had I made? A wrong filesystem type? Wrong flags in the formatting command?

clvic · 06-10-2008, 06:39 AM

I suggest adding the -v option to mkfs.vfat to get more details. And if it shows nothing meaningful, try looking at the system's log as maybe there is some damaged sector in the pendrive

lawrence_lee_lee · 06-11-2008, 10:53 PM

However, I later tried to plug the pendrive into a pc with Windows installed, and then I format the pendrive using Windows built-in tools. The pendrive then can be mounted again, like an ordinary proper pendrive!

This may suggest that the pendrive itself is alright, but I am formatting it improperly using mkfs.vfat, maybe due to incorrect flags.

Does anyone here had the experience of formatting a pendrive using Linux mkfs.vfat? Can any one help?

H_TeXMeX_H · 06-12-2008, 02:28 AM

Many ways to do it:

Code:

mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdb1
mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/sdb1

If it doesn't work, use fdisk and make sure there's a partition on /dev/sdb.