8 GB Flash drive formatted at 3.7 GB

[Chris Smart]

2009/12/21 Chris Smart <mail at christophersmart.com>:
>
> That's because you are trying to check the file system on the device,
> not the partition. Robert Nichols already pointed out that you need to
> be running that against /dev/sdb1 (where "1" is the first primary
> partition).
>

P.S. You might want to start the process again if you formatted /dev/sdb, too.

If fdisk is too complicated, you can achieve the same result with
parted (replace '/dev/sdX' with your CORRECT device, i.e. /dev/sdb):

su -c 'parted /dev/sdX mklabel msdos'
su -c 'parted /dev/sdX mkpartfs primary ext2 0% 100%'

This will prompt to confirm the actions, if you don't want it to
prompt, pass the "-s" (script) option after the "parted" command.

-c