On Thu, Jun 02, 2011 at 08:27:00AM -0700, Todd Cary wrote:
I have a usb drive, /media/disk and I want to reformat it. There are several questions that come up:
How can I determine the current format?
Do I use the mkfs command?
Many thanks...
Todd
To throw a caveat into the works here:
I was reading a while back some articles about the difficulties of using flash drives, which for purposes of this discussion includes, so I'm given to understand, not just SSDs but also usb flash devices. It was pointed out there that many (if not all, may be all, for all I know) of these devices are shipped with a specially tweaked FAT file system (FAT, VFAT, Fat32, whatever the specifics were I don't remember). These specially tweaked filesystems have been modified to take into account characteristics of the flash device, such that partitions may begin in odd places, or the FAT may have only one copy, or may be of a restricted size or in an odd location. All to optimize performance. Once you've reformatted it, you can never again revert to the original condition (unless you've saved a bit-wise image of it with, e.g., dd.)