How do you format a USB stick after it is being labled “unrecognised” by Ubuntu?

Question

I have a memory stick which I had cleaned of old data fragments.

The memory stick was mounted on /dev/sdc1 so I did:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc1 bs=1M

After the task was complete, my usb memory stick became unrecognized.

What do you do in this case to make the drive recognized again and partition it as FAT?

The "dd" command do not format any partition. It simply write blocks from/to devices. Your command just write zeros to the device of your usb stick partition. This is a easy way to cleanup the whole partition from old datafragments. But it is no formatting.

f4m8 · Accepted Answer · 2011-11-08 12:11:50Z

up vote 6 down vote accepted

If you want to create a filesystem on your usb stick partition, you should do

    mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdc1

as a user who as access rights to write to the partition, like root

answered Nov 8 '11 at 12:11

f4m8
40114

Thank you very much for the answer. – 0101amt Nov 9 '11 at 21:03

Michael Mrozek · Answer 2 · 2011-11-08 14:03:29Z

up vote 2 down vote

Use parted (gparted if you want a GUI) or fdisk to format partitions

edited Nov 8 '11 at 14:03

Michael Mrozek♦
23.7k574125

answered Nov 8 '11 at 10:26

dzift
211

fdisk creates partitions. To create a filesystem (format in DOS/Windows terminology), use mkfs. – Gilles Nov 8 '11 at 22:58

2 Answers