Flash Drive Format

English Hardware
1

I am a newbie who bought a 2 gig flash drive that I find is formatted W95 FAT32.
It looks as if PARTED is what I need to format the drive for Linux but I am not sure quite how to proceed. I have openSUSE 11.1 installed.

Would someone be kind enough to give me step-by-step instructions?

Preferably e-mail middgh@mweb.co.za

John. :frowning:

2

What about YaST > System > Partitioning. You have openSUSE running after all.

BTW

  1. not very clever to publish your e-mail address publicly on the net, or do you like spam?
  2. answers are not given by personal e-mail. Other people might long for the same answer.
3

Why don’t you leave it at fat32. It’s compatible with a lot of OS’s.

4

Thanks, Henk, sound advice that I shall keep in mind; fortunately no spam yet! I shall be on line for the whole weekend so can check from time to time. My problem is that I don’t know what partitioning to do. As I said, I am a newbie and this confonts me with all sorts of imponderable.

5

I’m dumb, on a learning curve! See my reply to Henk.

6

See post #2, but you might as well leave it at fat32, it is compatible with all O.S.'s

Andy

7

I interpreted your question as you were asking for a partition tool because you wanted to partition it differently then it is when you by it.

But now it seems that you just want to use it. Follow deltaflyer44’s advise and just connect it. What happens?

8

Identified as USB storage on power up, not found in sysinfo nor in fstab or mtab. I need to know what to enter in fstab fields. Do I format as ext2 or something? I presume fstab is set up after /dev/disk-bi-id…etc with /usb/Jet-Flash_…etc., but how do I define fields 2,3 and 4 if I leave as fat32? also wanted to format as Linux as I don’t like anytjing that smeels of Windows! rotfl!

9

Well you may not like Windows, but FAT32 is still a good idea. It’s compatible with lots of OSes, and also because it doesn’t carry ownership metadata, you won’t have problems of files not owned by you, etc, as you move it across systems. But it does have the disadvantage of not supporting files beyond a certain size.

10

Hey, you guys, I’m getting desperate! As intimated, the drive is just not recognised. I don’t wanr to move across systems; I use only openSUSE. Apart from entering fstab scsi data, I presume that I must also make an entry in the dev field. :’(

11

Suse mounts the drive in /media.
If you cna’t see it there, go to yast>system>partitioner and see if it shows up there.
You can make a permanent mount point for it by creating say /media/usb and mounting it there
If it’s formatted correctly, it’s probably best to leave it as fat32 so you can share data with windows pcs.

12

Yup, it’s in system partitioner partitioner wit two entries:
usb-jetFlash…T0-0:0 with device path pci0000-0… and
usb-jetFlash…T0-0:0-part1 and same device path, but surely I must set it up in fstab? How?
/dev/sdb /media/usb/? fat32 noauto,user,unhide 0 0?
As you will gather, I am completely in the dark.

13

I have a corsair flash voyager that said it was linux compatable but opensuse didn.t see it. I re-formated the usb stick and linux will see it. Have you tried to reformat the mem stick?

14

Try deleting the fstab entries for it. (Make a backup of fstab first.) I seem to remember that’s how I got usb to automount.
Else delete the noauto part in fstab.

15

Thats my problem - am not sure just what to enter in the four fields, apart from the first, which I presume is /dev/sdb (or should it be /dev/sdb1?). Or two entries with both?.

16

I don’t have any fstab entries yet! That’s what I’m after!

17

have you tried this:

  1. To find out the USB device name run fdisk -l
    In this case my stick is /dev/sdb1
  2. Make sure the memory stick isn’t mounted. To unmount run umount /dev/sdb1
  3. To format with ext3 filesystem run mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1
  4. To label your stick run e2label /dev/sdb1

does it show up fdisk -l

18

Many thanks - have formatted and now I know how to set fstab. You are my hero! :slight_smile:

19

The formatting went fine. Now I am stuck with fstab. The second field, fs_file, which I understand to be the mount point has me stumped. Entry is sdb1, ???, ext3, noauto,user,unhide 0 0. So I am still in the dark! Any suggestions? :’(

20

The mount point is something up to you. You apparently need diskspace somehere in your directory tree, so mount it there.

Examples:

You have a big web-site and your pages are at /svr/www/htdocs. So mount at /srv/www/htdocs. Or when you also have ftp data for the web-site, mount at /srv.

One particular user has a lot of music and he wants his own amount of data (and pays for it!). You as system administratot ask him where he wants this and then mount there: /home/<user>/Music (do not forget to chown this dir to his uid and his group).

I myself have a MySQL database ad wanted in /home because /home is backed-up and left alone when I install a new openSUSE. So I put it in /home/databases. So you could mount there. But you can also use /databases. Or, MySQL using /var/lib/mysql by default, mount it there.

Possibilities are endless. Knowing why you are doing it is important because then the place will be obvious in most cases.

A few warnings::
When you are going to use a dirctory that exists already first move everything in there to another place. Then mount. Then move it back to what now is the mounted diskspace. You will not loose it when you mount, but it will be unreachable until you umount again.

You can use YaST to create the entry in fstab and generate the mountpoint. But if you do it manualy do not forget to create the mountpoint before you try a mount (using mkdir is OK). And (as said earlier) se that owner/group and access bits are as they must be for the intended usage).

And a last remark when you are used to how MS-DOS and it windows children work: forget about their way of using disk partitiions only as a top of the new tree. Unix/Linux let you use it everywhere you want.