How to remove a damaged file

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Wed, 2008-04-23 at 16:24 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Wednesday 23 April 2008 16:14, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > 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.]
> >
> You're quite right about the purpose.
> 
> Listing the file types in fdisk, I only saw Linux and Linux Swap.  Do I have 
> to create ext2 then add a journal?  I did this once a long time ago.  Is it 
> e2fs?

It doesn't matter. Just create it as Linux. The exact filesystem type is
determined by the parameters you give to mkfs (ext3 by default IIRC).

poc