Restoring the format of a USB flash drive

When I was trying to make a bootable USB flash drive, I had a moment of panic because my Aspire One didn’t seem to boot from it at one point, and at another try at writing to it, I ended up cancelling the writing in the middle. Gah~! But the blog dotkam saved me by teaching me how to restore the format of a USB flash drive. I haven’t formatted anything in Linux in ages so this gave me a crash course on using the fdisk and mkfs.vfat utilities. It did show what it’s like to use the tools, including the messages it will show when you follow the guide step by step. Although they forgot to show how you figure out what the name of your device is. You could always check it via dmesg. When I checked it out using dmesg, I had no other flash drive so I wasn’t confused as to which one I was going to format. It showed me the manufacturer plus the capacity of the USB flash drive so I was certain.

Principle behind the guide:

1. Know what the device name is. You wouldn’t want to format something else by accident, right?
2. Check the partitions, if any exist, how many they are.
3. Delete the existing partitions one by one.
4. Create a new partition and write the changes to the USB flash drive.
5. Format the USB flash drive into something readable by other systems.

The fdisk tool didn’t seem too intimidating while I was following the instructions. “p” was for listing partitions, “d” was for deleting one, and so on. You could also use the fdisk tool to partition your hard drive when you need to do so.