How to remove a damaged file

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Wed, 2008-04-23 at 15:32 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Wednesday 23 April 2008 15:15, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-04-23 at 15:05 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
> > > Due to a loss of concentration I have a damaged directory called Packages
> > > on my pen-drive.  I can't rm it - Input/output error.  I've cleared
> > > everything else off. How can I get rid of this?
> >
> > Format the drive. You could also try fsck but an I/O error looks bad.
> >
> fsck said it had corrected errors, but it didn't help.  Strangely, here isn't 
> a man page for format.

I meant format as a generic term. On Unix/Linux it's mkfs.

Pendrives often have more than one partition. Format the largest one and
use that. The others are for useless builtin software which only runs on
Windows. You may or may not be able to remove them with fdisk (some
drives are highly non-standard in this respect).

[Generally VFAT is OK for pendrives, because portability is always good,
but remember it doesn't support symlinks or the Linux protection model.
For carrying stuff around it's fine. Also, careful with the total number
of files per folder since VFAT limits this (can't remember the number,
sorry). I've often run into "out of space" errors on a pendrive that's
only half full, because of the total number of files in a folder -- a
workaround is to create additional folders.

However since I suspect you're doing this to copy F9 Preview, ext3 is
probably the way to go in this case.]

poc