[arch-general] Label and Format USB Drive

[Ray Rashif]

On 17 June 2010 03:26, Sergey Manucharian <ingeniware at gmail.com> wrote:
> Excerpts from Carlos Mennens's message of Wed, 16 Jun 2010 15:11 -0400:
>
>> It appears Arch can't find /dev/sdd1 however I can find it fine when I
>> use the 'fdisk' utility. I don't understand why...
>
> You should not fdisk on a partition (like sdd1), only on the whole
> device e.g. /dev/sdd
>
>> [root at tuna ~]# mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdd1
>> mkfs.vfat 3.0.9 (31 Jan 2010)
>> /dev/sdd1: No such file or directory
>
> Nowadays some USB drives are not partitioned, so
> maybe you indeed have no /dev/sdd1, but just /dev/sdd - you can use the
> whole drive to create a file system, but I'd recommend to create a
> partition with fdisk first.
>
> Also "mkfs.vfat -n ocz_usb /dev/hdd1" will put the label right away.
>
>> When I look under the /dev/ directory, I don't see sda sdb sdc or sdd.
>
> That's strange, but by the way, how do you look into it?
> What is output of "ls -l /dev/sd*" ?

No partition (which is actually 1 primary partition without a proper
partition table) still shows up as sd(x)(n), as far as experience
goes.

One thing I like to do now is make sure of the allocation units. I
have noted a big difference in performance between drives formatted
with Linux/Windows' default tool(s) and those by HP Disk Format
Utility (or something like that). With the latter, 8GB gets 4,096
wheres 32 gets 16,384. Transfer rates (write) grew from 3MB/s to 7MB/s
across platforms.

http://www.patriotmemory.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3696


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