Formatting USB pen drive in Linux using Terminal
Sathya | June 13th, 2007 - 9:56 pm
Insert your USB pen drive. Let it get detected and mounted. Open Terminal. Type The Following commands
1. dmesg |tail –> here the ‘|’ key is the pipe, ie, the key before the backspace key(the upper one, so press shift)
You’ll get something like
sathya@shaman:~$ dmesg |tail
[ 9921.681164] sda: Write Protect is off
[ 9921.681174] sda: Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00
[ 9921.681178] sda: assuming drive cache: write through
[ 9921.709138] SCSI device sda: 4030464 512-byte hdwr sectors (2064 MB)
[ 9921.720951] sda: Write Protect is off
[ 9921.720963] sda: Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00
[ 9921.720967] sda: assuming drive cache: write through
[ 9921.721225] sda:
[ 9921.727896] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sda
[ 9921.744187] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
Note the terms in bold. In your system it will be different, maybe sdb or something. Whatever it may be, make sure to substitute it in the commands below, else your hard disk may get formatted.
2. Unmount your pen drive by using
sudo umount /dev/sda (In your case, please substitute sda with the appropriate device, listed above.
3. use the mkfs.vfat command to format to FAT32 filesystem, or mkfs.ext3 to format to ext3 filesystem
sudo mkfs.vfat -n ‘Label’ -I /dev/sda Replace Label with the name you want the pen drive to have.
4. That’s it! When done formatting, you’ll be returned to the prompt
sathya@shaman:~$ mkfs.vfat -n ‘sathya’ -I /dev/sda
mkfs.vfat 2.11 (12 Mar 2005)
sathya@shaman:~$
Remove and insert the pen drive to have mounted again!
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Hmm, Interesting, Never quite tried to do that in linux, I always used to do that in Windoze.
Please how do i solve the problem below?
how do i insert sbaah in sudoers file and where can i find the file
iam a linux newbie
[sbaah@Maint-Engineers ~]$ sudo umount /dev/sdb
Password:
Sorry, try again.
Password:
Sorry, try again.
Password:
sbaah is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
[sbaah@Maint-Engineers ~]$ sudo umount /dev/sdb1
sbaah is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Please umount the /dev/sda using root account.
# sudo umount /dev/sda
Pretty interesting.
[...] Posted in formatting, operating systems, linux, commands at 9:56 pm by ~sathya~ This article has been shifted to my new site [...]
This was very helpful. I have a few difficulties — I interpreted the -I option as -l — but I found my errors and make it happen. Thanks.
Thanks a lot
gr8 blog post 
Hey..can u explain in detail what the process behind this “mkfs.vfat” or “mkdosfs” is.what does it exactly do?i don quite get how the formatting is happening
@Above, Explaining how they work is pretty technical stuff, I dont know how it works.
You can have a look at the man pages:
http://linux.die.net/man/8/mkfs.vfat
mkfs.ext3: invalid inode size – /dev/sdc1
what has happened here??/
[...] Sathyasays [...]
Thanks. It works. I was even able to get a 2 year old non-working USB (or so I thought) after following your steps.
really its nice and worked well.thanks lot boss.
thanx dear
Nice piece of article. I got some errors. May be I should solve it and put on my blog. Thanks
Can you mention the errors you faced, Saurabh?
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ umount /dev/sdc
umount: /dev/sdc is not mounted (according to mtab)
I get above result when i use the given commands… What is happenning…??
Vishnu it means the device is not mounted. Proceed with step 3 of the post.
[...] Linux ?? pen drive ???? ?????? ????? (Formatting USB pen drive in Linux) [...]
I got these errors at terminal-
mkfs.vfat 3.0.1 (23 Nov 2008)
mkfs.vfat: Device partition expected, not making filesystem on entire device ‘/dev/sdb’ (use -I to override)
Now command is working with ‘I’ instead of ‘L’. It is ninth alphabet rather then 12th. I think theme font of blog is somewhat confusing between ‘l’ and ‘I’. I have read manual documentation of this command and experimented for different different formats on it . Thanks and God bless
after the dmesg |tail command I get the following:
FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sdb)
fat_get_cluster: invalid cluster chain (i_pos 0)
FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sdb)
fat_get_cluster: invalid cluster chain (i_pos 0)
FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sdb)
fat_get_cluster: invalid cluster chain (i_pos 0)
FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sdb)
fat_get_cluster: invalid cluster chain (i_pos 0)
FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sdb)
fat_get_cluster: invalid cluster chain (i_pos 0)
Can anyone help.
It is a 16GB Kingston USB drive
David, seems that the filesystem is corrupted. Please proceed with formatting.
LOl! In morning I forwarded two of my friends to @sathyabhat's following article: http://bit.ly/5oC0Fb without realizing that it's his blog.
@AkaneUdit http://sathyasays.com/2007/06/13/formatting-usb-pen-drive-in-linux-using-terminal/
plz tell any one how to format pen drive in linux
Dude, did you really think that the pipe key was placed at the same position, in every single keyboard?
LOL, in hindsight I realize that keyboard layout differ from country to country so the position would be lot different.
[...] derecho a su USB y pucharle en “formatear”. Si están en Linux entonces pueden hacerlo vía terminal o si estan en Ubuntu y son huevones como yo pueden usar el USB Startup Disk Creator, este lo [...]
omg, i formatted my windows partition C instead of usb!!!! “thanks” for help, could u please be MORE specific about sda and sbd, which do I choose, so next time I wont f..k my system
[...] a virus-infected USB drive, but I cannot get it to work using my Xandros on my EEEPC (instructions here). What would take hours of trying to figure out how to do it, was done in a matter of seconds in [...]
thanks
root@ravi:/home/ravi# dmesg |tail
[ 5639.791402] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] 65617920 512-byte hardware sectors: (33.5 GB/31.2 GiB)
[ 5639.794872] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is on
[ 5639.794879] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 03 00 80 00
[ 5639.794887] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 5639.794898] sdb:
[ 6589.481197] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] 65617920 512-byte hardware sectors: (33.5 GB/31.2 GiB)
[ 6589.485998] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is on
[ 6589.486005] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 03 00 80 00
[ 6589.486016] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 6589.486033] sdb:
root@ravi:/home/ravi# sudo umount /dev/sdb
umount: /dev/sdb: not mounted
root@ravi:/home/ravi# mkfs.vfat -n ‘ravi’ -I /dev/sdb
mkfs.vfat 3.0.1 (23 Nov 2008)
mkfs.vfat: unable to open /dev/sdb
this is what happening…..
could u help me out…..
I was not able to open my pendrive
The log says write-protect is on. Try switching off write protect.
hi sathya…
I am new to linux…
could u let me know how to switch off write protect?
Regards
Ravi
Write protect is something done via the hardware. Is this a “Kingston” 32GB flash disk ? One you got it for real low price ? I have a feeling it’s a fake
Yes u are exactly right, it is Kingston 32 GB flash drive…
Is there any option to make it work?
Regards
Ravi
@Ravi: Out of curiosity, how much did you pay for it ?