> No, the tool may be harder to find, but the need for it still exists. Most drivers cannot be 'reformatted' in the sense of putting back down address marks. They simply don't work like that any more. > You've obviously never had to reformat an IDE disk drive when power was > inexplicably lost during a write cycle and the write head wrote garbage > across some sectors that used to be properly formatted. This is a > function of how well the disk was designed and implemented. If you do > the same on a solid state device, you might write random data to a > random location, but that's about all. The actual blocks remain intact, > and don't ever need to be reformatted. Actually its a good deal more complicated in both cases. The disk is a storage system pretending to be a bunch of sectors on a bit of spinning glass and will manage such things internally along with the need to rewrite sectors now and then if adjacent sectors to the sides of it have been written a lot and other such magic. The fact it looks like a bunch of blocks on an ISA bus with some DMA glue added is simply layer upon layer of compatibility magic which really only gets broken in the mainstream for AHCI, and even then the disk pretends to be a 'disk' in the ancient sense as does flash. In the flash case a lot of management is needed for wear and because you cannot erase single sectors so need to do some quite complex block management. > > FAQ: How to format a Flash drive in Linux > > http://www.ehow.com/how_5092605_format-flash-drive-linux.html Which isn't actually formatting as such, it's merely updating the partition data and maybe writing some sectors. In the case of FAT that is going to involve writing the FAT and root directories so will do the job quite fine anyway as far as I can see. > > I'm not 100% sure now, but I believe even 1992's IBM OS/2 2.0 featured > > a "format" option on any drive object's pop-up menu > > Yes, another piece of software that was afraid to do something too > different from Windows.... but, Unix (and Linux) pre-dates Windows (at > least Windows 95....) No another meaningless option that wouldn't actually do anything. If you want to blank a drive into a new file system format you just need to be sure to clean up any confusing superblocks and get the type right. For the same fs you will hit the metadata anyway. And if you want to blank a disk you need to issue a security erase command, not just overwrite the data. The latter does not do what you would always want on modern storage systems, particularly flash. Alan -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
