Try formatting!

One of the routine that I regularly have to follow is to format my pen drive every once in a while. Even though I use Ubuntu at home, things inside the little drive often gets out of hands once it is entered into a Windows run pc packed with virus. Anyways, the thing that is then necessary is go give it a cleanup.


To do this, I first check all my partitions of my file system using the sudo fdisk -l command. According to man fdisk “fdisk (in the first form of invocation) is a menu driven program for creation and manipulation of partition tables. ” -l will ensure the listing of all the partitions. When I run the command on my pc, I got this output:


tarif@tarif-desktop:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes

255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Disk identifier: 0x5a4fa8c1

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/sda1 * 1 3243 26049366 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

/dev/sda2 3244 9729 52098795 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)

/dev/sda5 3244 6486 26049366 b W95 FAT32

/dev/sda6 6487 6610 995998+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

/dev/sda7 6611 9729 25053336 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 1017 MB, 1017117696 bytes

33 heads, 63 sectors/track, 955 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 2079 * 512 = 1064448 bytes

Disk identifier: 0xf522590c

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/sdb1 1 956 993263 b W95 FAT32

Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):

phys=(0, 1, 1) logical=(0, 0, 33)

Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:

phys=(217, 32, 63) logical=(955, 17, 42)


You can clearly see that the disturbing part is the pen drive part! Just what we need. Now, what we are actually going to do is to create a linux file system on our device (which is the USB data drive in this case). So, we need to use the mkfs, which “is used to build a Linux file system on a device, usually a hard disk partition”. Before using the command, we need to unmount the USB drive. So we should write in my case,


sudo umount /dev/sdb1


The drive is now unmounted.



Now we need to use the mkfs command, I'll assume that everyone is very careful at this point, because as my genius friend Taskinoor Hasan once said, “mkfs can not make mistakes. But you can only mistakenly vaporize your entire drive using it!”


So, let's format the thing now!


Write sudo mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdb1


The output was

tarif@tarif-desktop:~$ sudo mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdb1

mkfs.vfat 2.11 (12 Mar 2005)


It's done with ease!


All credit goes to Taskinoor Hasan who taught me this little trick while chatting! This guy is a gem, great to have him as a mentor and friend.


Cheers everyone and if not already, prepare to fall in love!