Reformat thumbdrive?

neogranas · #1 25th January 2008, 03:27 PM

I am sorry if I am asking something that has been explained before, but at work they handed out a bunch of 1GB thumb drives, I was able to pick up two, but when I am stuck. I let a friend use one last night to get a large file home, 700MB and he didn't want to let his DSL download it, we've got a connection to the Sprint backbone at work.

He brought it to me this morning and I deleted the file, but my thumb drive is still showing the space being taken. On top of that it is only recognizing 960MB, but my other is showing 999MB (exact same thumb drive).

I assume something may have gone screwy when he unmounted from his XP machine, but what can I do to salvage it? I don't mind reformatting it, I can copy the files to this computer then do that.

Any have a step by step to reformat or a way to correct it? I checked and it won't let me empty trash on the thumb drive. I checked it in terminal, not seeing the file anywhere.

forkbomb · #2 25th January 2008, 03:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by neogranas

I am sorry if I am asking something that has been explained before, but at work they handed out a bunch of 1GB thumb drives, I was able to pick up two, but when I am stuck. I let a friend use one last night to get a large file home, 700MB and he didn't want to let his DSL download it, we've got a connection to the Sprint backbone at work.

He brought it to me this morning and I deleted the file, but my thumb drive is still showing the space being taken. On top of that it is only recognizing 960MB, but my other is showing 999MB (exact same thumb drive).

I assume something may have gone screwy when he unmounted from his XP machine, but what can I do to salvage it? I don't mind reformatting it, I can copy the files to this computer then do that.

Any have a step by step to reformat or a way to correct it? I checked and it won't let me empty trash on the thumb drive. I checked it in terminal, not seeing the file anywhere.

If you want to format it, try gparted.

yum install gparted

Typically, flash drives come formatted as FAT32 or FAT16.

In Fedora, when deleting stuff off thumb drives, make sure you hold down shift and then right click on the file to delete it - otherwise i think it will be send to a trash directory on the thumb drive.

neogranas · #3 25th January 2008, 06:11 PM

Thanks for the tips, I was able to delete and make some room, then I realized I didn't have the Show Hidden Files enabled, so I found the stuff that was hogging room and got rid of it, I'd still like to reformat to get the extra 30MB out of it. Gparted is saying it's locked and I can't reformat, I am running as root because it asks for root password when I run it.

forkbomb · #4 25th January 2008, 07:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by neogranas

Thanks for the tips, I was able to delete and make some room, then I realized I didn't have the Show Hidden Files enabled, so I found the stuff that was hogging room and got rid of it, I'd still like to reformat to get the extra 30MB out of it. Gparted is saying it's locked and I can't reformat, I am running as root because it asks for root password when I run it.

Ah, sorry. I forgot that trash folders are usually hidden (I assume the directory name was .trash?)

Interesting as far as the lock...

Just a note:

When using the command line to display files, you can use ls -a to display all folders including hidden ones (for example, open up a command line and run ls -a ~/ and then run it without the switch - you might be surprised how many hidden directories are in there). So if you weren't seeing the files when you were looking at the drive from the CLI, that may have been why.

Silly trash concept.

I bypass it when possible.

EDIT: as far as that extra 30MB, drives are rarely as big as they're "supposed" to be. I bought a "2GB" PNY flash drive and all my operating systems say it has only about 1.87GB of space available. (Same with my hard drive - it's a 320GB Seagate and I really can only store 298GB on it. Don't know where my 20GB went - maybe somebody smarter than me can enlighten...)

neogranas · #5 25th January 2008, 08:40 PM

I knew about the -a argument, but I didn't see that when I originally tried through terminal. I'm not sure why it didn't show up.

As for the space goes, I'd like to have that extra room simply because there is hardly any software on it, I have another flash drive, exact same model from NewEgg, but it holds ~999MB (though might be 996MB to be realistic). And seeing as about once a week I may be transporting half a gig worth of files (video clips, so a few can take up a lot of room), the extra 30MB would allow for some default work files and give me more room.

sidebrnz · #6 25th January 2008, 09:25 PM

There are two reasons the drive shows less space than expected. First, the formatting takes up some of the space. Second, it's quite possible that the drive has 2,000,000,000 bytes of space -- two billion in base 10 -- and your computer is calculating in Gigabytes, using 1,073,741,824 bytes per Gig, or 2,147,483,648 for 2 Gig. If both are true, that might explain the discrepancy.

notageek · #7 26th January 2008, 01:15 PM

Assuming the device (thumb drive) is seen in fedora as /dev/sdc1

unmount the thumb drive (but don't remove it)

try the following

Code:

fdisk /dev/sdc

type d (to delete) then select 1

then type n (for new) and then select primary

type w to write the partition.

After you're done with fdisk try

Code:

mkfs.vfat /dev/sda1

This should help you reformat the thumb drive however sidebrnz's got a valid point.

ryptyde · #8 26th January 2008, 02:12 PM

I would open a terminal and enter:

Code:

$ df -h

and that will show you the drives and then you can be sure to choose
the right one to format.

neogranas · #9 26th January 2008, 03:12 PM

It is a good point, and thanks for the commands, they are what I was looking for. However, as I said before, this is 1 of 2 identical thumb drives. I plugged in my other to be sure, it gets 997MB, this one is getting 968MB now. I'm just trying to find what is causing one to formatted for a higher capacity.