recovery usb drive reformat

I had used the Linpus recovery disc to make my USB hard drive a recovery drive, out of curiosity. I had planned on reformatting the drive afterward with my XP box. However, while it is recognized as a USB device, it won't mount as an accessible drive. Under Linpus on my AAO, it mounts and displays as containing recovery files, owned by root. I am given no option to format in the right-click context menu (as XP has trained me to seek), though I would guess that as usual there's a clever but arcane terminal command to do what I want to do.

What I would like to do, under one OS or the other, is to format the USB drive to FAT32 (or some other mutually understood file system) and lose the recovery data (as it's a waste of storage on the single partition of the disk, and I have a USB CDRW/DVD). Does anyone know how I can get it assigned a drive letter (mounted?) under XP, or what commands/utilities will let me format it under Linpus, please?

 

I have somewhat similar problem.

I instaled linux mint on my usb. I tried to boot it on my AA1. It booted on text version (but it is not a problem), the problem is that my desktop do not recognize this drive anymore (I have XP and SUSE there). But at the same time my AAO recognizes it without any problem.

The question is how to format USB drive on the linpus in FAT format?

 

WinXP does not recognize ext2-formatted devices; is that the problem? There's a program called Ext2Fsd that will provide drivers that allow WinXP to work with ext2 and ext3 filesystems. To reformat your USB device with a FAT filesystem (which will wipe whatever you've got on it), go into fdisk, change the partition type from 83 (Linux) to b (FAT32), write it to the device and exit. Then

Code:

sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/your-usb-device-goes-here

 

Well fdisk did not work for me. It refuses to format it. I do not remember exactly what it says but it does not do the thing.

 

I had the same thing, and as best I can remember, I downloaded a program to the AAO called gparted using yum (I think it was sudo yum install parted that did the trick, but can't remember for sure). I formatted to fat32 using sudo parted /dev/sdb mkfs fat32, where /dev/sdb is the correct device name for the USB stick. I found this out by typing sudo parted -l to get a list of attached drives.

Hope that helps.

 

Thanks! ext2fsd allowed me to see the drive in XP, and to change the filesystem of the partition, but not the whole drive (whatever that distinction means), nor to get it assigned a drive letter. gparted did the trick however, of course through commands that I never would've even had a hunch to try on my own-- who needs transparency or ease of use anyway, right? Anyway, much appreciated.

Not 100% on subject, but while I'm here, is it normal for the contents of a newly mounted drive to auto-display twice, in two simultaneous instances of the file manager?

 

No, however, it doesn't appear to be something to worry about.

 

Heh, I know what you mean - took me a fair bit of googling to work that out last week.