I would like to thank the two posters following the first post for drawing my attention that 'my' method may not appeal to those brandishing very large USB sticks. Excuse my reaction, but ridicule is not the best vehicle for correction.
The Method:
Using gparted to format a USB stick has its downside of creating a partition table and thus wasting several megabytes of space. Since a USB stick usually contains just one partition it is normally pointless to create a partition table like an MBR and GPT
mkdosfs can be instructed to create a partition without requiring a partition table as follows:
Code: Select all
# mkdosfs -I -F 32 /dev/sdx
- -I
USB sticks usually don't hold more than one partition. This
switch tells mkdosfs to create a file system without checking
for the presence of a partition table, thereby utilizing all the
available space without constraints.
This switch will force mkdosfs to work properly. - -F FAT-size
Specifies the type of file allocation tables used (12, 16 or 32
bit). If nothing is specified, mkdosfs will automatically
select between 12, 16 and 32 bit, whatever fits better for the
file system size. - /dev/sdx
Is the device node representing the USB stick.