Formatting a USB Drive in Ubuntu

USB drives support two basic formats: floppy drive and hard drive. A USB floppy drive consists of one large formatted drive. In contrast USB hard drives contain partition tables and one or more formatted partitions. If you purchased a thumb drive and never formatted it, then it is most likely configured as a USB hard drive with one large partition.

Before formatting or partitioning any device, be sure the device is not mounted! Use the mount command (without any parameters) to see if it is mounted, and then use umount to unmount any partitions. For example, to unmount /dev/sdc1 mounted at /media/usbdrive, you can use sudo umount /dev/sdc1 or sudo umount /media/usbdrive.

Thumb drives are usually partitioned just like a regular hard drive. Commands such as fdisk and cfdisk can easily modify the drive partitions, and mkfs can be used to format a partition. Besides capacity, speed is a significant difference between thumb drives and hard drives. When you change the partition table on a flash drive or format a partition, wait a few seconds before removing the drive; otherwise, some data may be buffered and not yet transferred.

When you use the fdisk or cfdisk command on a thumb drive, you configure it as a USB hard drive. However, you can also configure it as a USB floppy drive. This requires formatting the device without partitioning it. For example, to make an ext2-formatted USB floppy drive on my 64 MB USB thumb drive (/dev/sdc), I can use:

$ sudo mkfs /dev/sdc
mke2fs 1.38 (30-Jun-2005)
/dev/sdc is entire device, not just one partition!
Proceed anyway? (y,n) y
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=1024 (log=0)
Fragment size=1024 (log=0)
16128 inodes, 64512 blocks
3225 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=1
8 block groups
8192 blocks per group, 8192 fragments per group
2016 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
8193, 24577, 40961, 57345

Writing inode tables: done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

This filesystem will be automatically checked every 22 mounts or
180 days, whichever comes first. Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.
$ sudo sync


When you first plug in a USB hard drive, all the partitions will appear and automatically mount. However, to create a USB floppy drive, be sure to unmount all partitions and then format the main device (for example, /dev/sda or /dev/sdc) and not a partition (for example, /dev/sda2 or /dev/sdc1). You will need to disconnect and reconnect the device after you format it in order to remove any stale device partition identifiers.

When writing to a thumb drive, I usually run the sync command (sudo sync). This flushes all cached data to the disk. When the command returns, it is safe to remove the drive.

Source of Information : Hacking Ubuntu Serious Hacks Mods and Customizations