How should I format my USB stick?

[Guest]

Ok I basically am used to Puppy, but the one thing I can

[syzygy]

when you buy flash sticks they're usually already formatted with dos or fat file structure. has your's lost format, or do you want to format as ext2?

[gnomen]

if your usb-stick is at /dev/sda1

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mkdosfs /dev/sda1

should format it

[Guest]

Well, I have it formatted, yea, but I can't figure out how to format it and erase all of the write-protected stuff. I tried mkdosfs /dev/sda1 (yea, I'm sure it's sda1), but I think I'll just use one of the Windows computers (god forbid!).

[SnowDog]

Whenever I do usb installs it wipes it out (if there was anything on it) and goes from there....just go to usb install & it should walk you through it.

[shankargopal as Guest]

I have had a lot of bad experiences with a badly formatted Trascend JetFlash USB stick (you can search the forum for some of those ). In my experience, what worked best was to use fdisk under Puppy (cfdisk refused to open it), delete all existing partitions, use fdisk's expert mode to set the stick at 32 sectors per track (not sure if this actually makes a difference), and create a new partition of type FAT16. Then, reboot into Windows (shudders and all) and use Windows to format the partition.

This worked best for me. It was only after I did all this that the stick booted properly using Wake2Pup or WakeUSB (on some computers one works, on some computers the other works). And as for booting straight from USB, with Transcend sticks it just never works for some reason.