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Old February 12th, 2010, 14:29
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Default How-To repartiton (format) a USB flash drive.
The partition and formatting on a USB flash memory drive is sometimes a bit faulty.

Symptoms include (but are not limited to) FreeBSD complaining about the start and/or end of the partiton not being on a track boundary, the total number of sectors not being a multiple of the number of tracks, the drive not being recognised especially in MS Vista and errors when saving files in Windows.

If you have a malfunctioning USB stick try this:

Copy off any files you want to keep. (important)

Plug in the stick and check what device it is recognised as. It's usually da0 if you don't have any SCSI drives. But CHECK.

Now remove the existing partiton information:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 bs=2m count=1

Create a new slice/partiton
# fdisk -i /dev/da0
In the interactive section accept the defaults except for sysid, which is 165 for FreeBSD but for FAT32 is 12.
Ignore the 'fdisk: Class not found' error.

Create a new file system ('format')
# newfs_msdos -F32 /dev/da0s1

Enjoy working USB drive.
Last edited by DutchDaemon; February 12th, 2010 at 21:12. Reason: added [cmd] tags
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Old February 12th, 2010, 14:50
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Why would one want to partition usb flash?
Simply run newfs_msdos /dev/da0, and it works well
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Old February 12th, 2010, 16:27
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Hmmm, now I'm going to have to find another USB drive with a wonky filesystem to try that on.
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Old February 12th, 2010, 19:22
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Quote:
Originally Posted by killasmurf86 View Post
Why would one want to partition usb flash?
Simply run newfs_msdos /dev/da0, and it works well
I've seen a flash drive get a corrupted partition table before. No idea how it got that way, but the above is exactly how I was able to make it usable again. (After playing with it to recover the data off of it of course, but that's another discussion.)
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Old February 12th, 2010, 20:29
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Quote:
Originally Posted by killasmurf86 View Post
Why would one want to partition usb flash?
Simply run newfs_msdos /dev/da0, and it works well
8g flash drive, don't need 8G of fat32 storage*, would like to also have a small install of freebsd (for testing, obviously).



*okay, I didn't need an 8G flash drive at all, but the dang thing was on sale for less than a 4G drive
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