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Sometimes when people create a Linux USB drive they find that the drive seems to
become unusable. This guide will show you how to format the USB drive again
using Linux so that you can copy files to it and use it as you ordinarily would.
After you have followed this guide your USB drive will be usable on any system
capable of reading a FAT32 partition. Anybody familiar with Windows will notice that
the fdisk tool used within Linux is much like the diskpart tool.
sudo fdisk -l
This will tell you which drives are available and it also gives you details
of the partitions on the drives.
Look for the drive which has the same capacity as your USB drive. For
example on an 8 gigabyte drive it will be reported as 7.5 gigabytes.
02 When you have the correct drive type the following command:
03 This will open a new prompt called "Command". The "m" key is very
helpful with this tool but basically you need to know 2 of the
commands.
04 Enter d and press the Enter key. If your USB drive has more than one
partition it will ask you to enter a number for the partition you wish to
delete. If your drive only has one partition then it will be marked for
deletion.
If you have multiple partitions keep entering d and then enter partition
1 until there are no partitions left to be marked for deletion.
01 Within the terminal window open fdisk again as you did before by
specifying the name of the USB device file:
04 The next step is to choose a partition number. You only need to create
1 partition so enter 1 and press Enter.
05 Finally you need to choose the start and end sector numbers. To use
the whole drive press return twice to keep the default options.
A message may appear stating that the kernel is still using the old partition table.
sudo partprobe
The partprobe tool informs the kernel or partition of table changes. This saves you
having to reboot your computer.
The minus d switch lets you try it without it updating the kernel. The d
stands for dry run. This is not overly ube-d
sudo partprobe -d
sudo partprobe -s
Summary
You should now be able to use the USB drive on any computer and copy files to
and from the drive as normal.