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I've tortured my USB flash drive by formatting to different filesystems, partitioning, dd, parted mklabel gpt/msdos and other things. Now, Ubuntu's start up disk creator seems confused when creating disk with my USB flash drive. So, how can I get the original condition from my USB drive like it was before I tortured it?

I don't mean to make it as new as when I buy it for the first time. I just don't know, when it was new is it NTFS or FAT32? Is it /dev/sdx or /dev/sdx with /dev/sdxy inside it?

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It was probably FAT32. The question of "naming" the device depends on how many devices you have connected. You can see the current filesystem by executing mount.

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  • Mount is only showing you current filesystem. I didn't see a USB flash drive with other fs than this one. Of course I have USB flash drives with other fs than FAT32. Apr 27, 2015 at 9:31
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There's no way to estabilish the filesystem the drive was shipped with, anyway if you're going to use the drive with Startup Disk Creator that's irrelevant because the drive will be repartiotioned / reformatted by Startup Disk Creator itself.

Whether/dev/sdX or /dev/sdY is used, that's irrelevant as well, because the naming just reflects the internal order in which the drives were enumerated; e.g. if a system uses two SATA hard disks and an USB drive, the first SATA device detected at boot time (which is usually the drive using the first used SATA connector between SATA1, SATA2, SATA3 [...]) will always be /dev/sda, while an USB drive connected after /dev/sda and /dev/sdb after the boot is complete will always be /dev/sdc.

Also note that /dev/sdX is used to reference a device, while /dev/sdXx is used to reference a single partition.

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