Hardware - Reformatting a thumb-drive feffer777 - 28.07.2006, 20:39 Uhr Titel: Reformatting a thumb-drive
This first paragraph is a howto, but some questions follow. I have a SanDisk thumb-drive that came with "U3" software installed on a partition that apparently has a CD file system "burned on" and then hidden in such a way that it's very difficult to reformat the drive to a single fat32 partition. I found the U3 launchpad very annoying and wanted it gone. However, any attempt to reformat the thumb-drive only results in the second (data portion) partition being reformatted.There is a windows only tool which will remove the U3 software. Find it at: http://www.u3.com/uninstall/ . After this is done, you can reformat the whole drive as fat32.
I'm wondering if there is a way to do the job under linux? I tried things like "# cfdisk /media/sdb1" and got "opened disk as read only, no permission...etc". So this wouldn't even reformat the "data" partition, let alone remove the "CD partition". So, out of curiosity, is there a way to do this under linux?
After reformatting the drive, it seemed to work flawlessly on windows and mac. On my kanotix box, it sometimes seems to stall on mount and remain "busy" when I try to unmount or "safely remove". If it doesn't unmount cleanly, I get data corruption which isn't apparent until I try to copy the files to another machine. So I added this to /etc/fstab:
/dev/sdb1 /media/sdb1 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0
Does that look right? Is it even necessary? I ask, because I have an external usb hd which mounts as sda1. If I don't have it on/mounted, then the thumb-drive will mount as sda1 otherwise the thumb-drive mounts as sdb1.