Hello,
On Tue, Jun 25, 2024 at 09:53:41AM -0400, Lee wrote:
> My question is: how do I reformat the flash drive so it's usable as a
> "normal" flash drive again?
Nowadays, people rarely "format" (*) their "drives".
They create filesystems on raw devices.
For example `mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX`, where /dev/sdX is the raw device
corresponding to your USB key (see the lsblk command, for example).
> Nothing I tried worked.. I ended up putting the thumb drive in a
> Windows machine and formatting it there; it would be nice to know how
> to restore the thumb drive to working order on Debian.
However, for Microsoft compatibility, in addition, you will need
a partition table. Linux, except for booting (because of BIOS
requirements), does not require partition tables.
So, first create a partition e.g. with fdisk[1]: this will make
/dev/sdX1 available in lsblk.
Then again, for Microsoft compatibility, you need to create
a Microsoft-compatible filesystem. One good alternative is
VFAT.
Thus with `mkfs.vfat /dev/sdX1`.
Please double-check you use the right raw device name, as fdisk and mkfs
commands are destructive.
(*) actually the last time I did format a device using a SCSI
command was in the nineties -- some people differentiate
"low-level formatting" with "high-level formatting", which
is better called "creating a filesystem" -- yes back then
it was sometimes useful to reformat using 256 bytes/sector
for RAID0 applications :)
[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/create-a-partition-in-linux
