what is the best way to format flash drive?

[007casper]

The flashdrive was corrupted or something. I couldnt access it at all. So, I decided to reformat it.

so I followed this link
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/miscellaneous/122254-solved-cant-remove-files-usb-flashdrive.html

then


dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb1

then try to format it without any luck.

I used gparted and tried to format it to fat16 without any success. Then tried fat32 without success. NTFS doesnt work either. So, I format it to ext4 file format. Now the permissions for flash disk is root. I cant chown.

What is the best way to format the flash drive from the terminal?

fdisk -l


Disk /dev/sdb: 8011 MB, 8011120640 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 973 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000d71f9

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 973 7815591 83 Linux

[007casper]

I did have some good luck


chown user:group FLASHDRIVE


that allowed me to use it as a regular user. However, if I mounted the flashdrive to PC, it asked me to format the flashdrive.

So, I reformatted the flashdrive to fat32, then back to kubuntu and it works. I checked on gparted it does show as fat32.

I wonder ~ why I couldnt formated as fat32 on gparted on kubuntu?

[kurt18947]

I did have some good luck


chown user:group FLASHDRIVE
that allowed me to use it as a regular user. However, if I mounted the flashdrive to PC, it asked me to format the flashdrive.

So, I reformatted the flashdrive to fat32, then back to kubuntu and it works. I checked on gparted it does show as fat32.

I wonder ~ why I couldnt formated as fat32 on gparted on kubuntu?

I don't know the answer to your question but have seen the same thing. Using gparted to format a flash drive to fat32 will create a device that works with *nix but is not recognized by Windows for whatever reason. Live USBs created on flash drives formatted with gparted won't boot on some systems as well. Some systems will boot a flash drive formatted fat32 with gparted, others will display an boot error message.

[mastablasta]

what is the solution then? to use format.exe via wine or dosbox? :-D