RE: [SLE] Format usb floppy

On Wednesday, July 06, 2005 @ 10:30 PM, Rafe wrote:

--- Bryan Tyson wrote:

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On Wednesday 06 July 2005 21:18, Rafe wrote:

...

How does one format a usb floppy? The floppy is on /dev/sda.

How about mkfs -t vfat /dev/sda1

Bryan

I thought you added the file system after you formated. I am not sure, but I thought first you do a low level format and then partion and then you run mkfs.

A quick check shows:

mkfs -t vfat /dev/sda mkfs.vfat 2.10 (22 Sep 2003) mkfs.vfat: Will not try to make filesystem on full-disk device '/dev/sda' (use -I if wanted)

So I tried cfdisk /dev/sda to create an empty partion, but got an error about the partions being messed up.

So I tried fdisk. It appears to work if you fdisk to one partion with type 6 and then run mkdosfs (mkfs -t vfaat same thing)

I always though you HAD to do a low level format - maybe not.

Thanks for idea. It looks like the right track.

Rafe

mkfs means make a file system. It's the same thing as formatting. If you're talking about physical partitions, you can "make" partitions (and file systems) on a hard drive. For example, people who have dual boot systems with Windows sharing Linux will have (at least) two file systems, NTFS or some earlier Windows file system for the Windows partition and one of the Linux supported file systems for the Linux partition. Each file system has certain underlying data structures to control it. I'm not all that up on Linux file systems but for NTFS, there's something called the master file table, which is basically a directory for all of the files in that partition. Each file system has it's on underlying architecture, which gets created when you do the mkfs. Greg Wallace