Brain fart: no format option on a pen drive pop-up menu?

[Kevin J. Cummings]

On 08/26/2011 12:49 PM, Fernando Cassia wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 13:31, Bryce Hardy <brycehardy at gmail.com> wrote:
>> As a workaround, use Gnome Disk Utility, (search yum for
>> gnome-disk-utility if not already installed.) Hopefully it's available
>> for F10, I wouldn't know for sure. Hope this helps.
> 
> Thanks Bryce!
> 
> For the record, is there a Format option available in the current F15,
> when you right-click on a removable storage device? Just curious...

I would guess that it would depend on your definition of "format".

Linux does not have a program called "format".  What most people think
of of "format" is actually a combination of other programs, most notibly
laying down a file system (and not formatting the drive).

A pen drive does not need a low level format (the program which lays
down tracks and sectors on a floppy or hard disk drive).  The pen drive
is more akin to system memory where the storage "locations" are already
done in hardware.  For the most part, a pen drive is just a sequence of
logical blocks of some default size.

[Remember, that pen drives have a finite limitation on the number of
writes that will succeed before the drive starts to "fail".]

You can choose to partition your pen drive, or not.  fdisk (or any of
the so called XXXdisk programs) can write a partition table to your pen
drive so that you can have multiple partitions if you so desire.

Most pen drives come already "formatted" with a VFAT or NTFS file system
already on the drive.  But this is really just a file system laid down
on the physical media.  (Some come with a partition table, some don't.)
 If you require a different file system, you should use the mkXXfs
programs to write out the type of file system you want on the drive.

Most of these functions can be done from the disk utility programs which
probably got installed in your installation (unless you did a minimal
installation).

I hope this was useful.

> FC

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at verizon.net
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)