On Thu, 2010-08-19 at 21:37 +0530, Parshwa Murdia wrote: > From the very basics, could you please tell me sequentially:- > > i) How to know the partition name while inserting usb pen drive? > Running "fdisk -l" or "fdisk" yields, but with "sdb" not written 1 or > 2 at the end of 'sdb', and for sure, 'sdb' is the pen drive partition > name. Or the command, "dmesg | tail"? Looking at the tail end of dmesg moments after you've inserted a drive is an easy way to see where the system finds it. And you don't need to be the root user to read that info. With fdisk, you have to be familiar with all your drives on the system, so you can tell apart the newly inserted one from the others. That's probably not too hard to do with a single USB flash drive, but gets complex with multiple drives. > ii) After that, I have to unmount it, using the command "umount > /dev/sdb" so that it could be formatted. Is that a question? > iii) Now for formatting, I would have to use either vfat or ext3. But > how to know whether to use the former or the later? vfat if you want to easily use the device on different computer systems, including different Linux systems where your (numerical) user ID isn't always the same on each system. ext3 if you want to keep the different permissions and ownerships per user, only intend to use it on Linux systems, or Windows systems where you've installed extra drivers to handle ext3. > iv) I guess it would be correct: > > $ umount /dev/USBPARTITIONNAME > > $ /sbin/mkdosfs -F 32 -n usbdisk /dev/USBPARTITIONNAME > > Where, USBPARTITIONNAME is what I would be getting from query i) Looks right. But don't take my word for it, read: man mkdosfs -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines