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UPDATE: The pendrive was for my parents. When I got a chance, I got it formatted from a Windows machine at my friend's house. I can't try any suggessions in the comments or answers, because I have left home for college. But I am interested to know why mkfs did not work. The pendrive was not recognize by Windows either after doing a mkfs.vfat. I will accept an answer which includes why mkfs did not work.

I have a working USB stick. I made a Ubuntu installation disk, probably using dd. Then after a while, when I reformatted it to use it with my car music system, it is not working. I get this:

USB device not recognised

I get this error when I try to format it from nautilus:

enter image description here

But it can be formatted by the below command but does not work with the player:

mkfs.vfat -n Musiq /dev/sdc1

Another pen drive, which was never formatted by me, works fine.

Here is the output of fdisk -l for the device:

Disk /dev/sdc: 8004 MB, 8004304896 bytes
212 heads, 46 sectors/track, 1603 cylinders, total 15633408 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x74fdf679

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1            2048    15633407     7815680   83  Linux

Also this is the output of fdisk -l for the working pen drive.

The partition table is msdos. I strongly believe that I am not correctly formatting/partitioning the stick.

What could be wrong?

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  • 2
    Have you tried the Disks utility or Gparted? Also, your working pen drive is formatted fat32, non-working shows Linux. You may want to format as fat32.
    – RCF
    Jul 27, 2015 at 5:33

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
3

try to format the pen drive as FAT32 using disk utility in Ubuntu. search for disk in dash.

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The problem seems to be the partition type in the partition table. It is still Linux as it's shown by fdisk.

I could reproduce same thing here. I used gparted to create an Ext4 partition. Then mkfs.vfat to format it. It does format it but it leave its type as Linux in the table.

  • You may gnome-disks as mentioned by minion91, it could make only Fat32.
  • gparted support both Fat16/Fat32.

  • Manually:

    1. Run fdisk /dev/sdc1, t change type to e then w to rewrite the table.

    2. Then format it:

      mkfs.fat -F16 -n Musiq /dev/sdc1

Order Doesn't matter but replug it if partition size changed.

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use parted command on linux if you don't have it just download it! so run the command below: 

parted /dev/sdx
mklabel msdos
q

and then partition it by running the command: 

fdisk /dev/sdx
n
then chose as you like for the configuration and then type:
t
then select the partition you just created for example we gonna chose 1
then type "0c" because we gonna change the type from linux to fat32 LBA
then type w

done your problem solved ezezezez edit:

so basicly the problem was when creating the partition with fdisk or even cfdisk change the type from "linux" to w95 fat32

done your problem solved again ezezezez

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