dear community,
How do I restore a USB flash drive back to its original state? Note: i have some sticks here - that have flash-versions of linux on it - i want to use those sticks for other purposes now. so the question is:
How do I restore a USB flash drive back to its original state?
i tried to figure it out - and here is what i have gotten out of asking some friends and looking around here and there. i have written down all that i have found - plz set me straight if i am wrong…
here we go: the steps:
Or how can I reset a USB drive to factory settings? After having tooled around with a USB Linux version.
note: i do not want to use GUI-tools
should i do this with the usage of the dd raw command - and using the dd raw image overwritten or multi partitioned flash drive
i think it is pretty necessary to revert back to a single Fat, Fat32, exFAT or NTFS partition.
well which is the best way and method to reset or restore the USB flash drive back to its original state.
this means - how to allow the Resetted USB drive to be detected, readable, and useable again by all computers.
note: i have been working with tools such as Etcher to burn an ISO or Win32 Disk Imager to write an image.
that was great - but now - i want to restore it back to normal - on linux-terminal
well that said i think that it is pretty important to check first what is the USB flash drive name
i normally do this every time i am about to do anything with its file system.
so the very first step is to find the name of the device in the Terminal - on command line.
we can check the name in the command line too. it is found out be running this command:
sudo fdisk -l
this command helps us finding the name of the device using the terminal
so we are able to see all the partitions of our system as output of this command.
that is so great: we need to find our flash drive based on its size.
in the next step i am going to format a bootable USB to a let us say normal stick
we need to do several steps - that is to delete the entire file system from the USB device and then formatting it with a pretty new filesystem.
the first step is to wipe the filesystem from our flash drive
i for one i suggest to completely wipe the whole (that is all) filesystem from our flash drive:
With that we are to restore it to its original state - the genuinte state.
i sugest to run this command to wipe the filesystem from our demo flash drive:
sudo wipefs --all /dev/sdb
and afterward we can do a test:
well after we have wiped it - after we have wiped the filesystem - our usb-stick is pretty new - and completely clean.
we can check that with:
sudo fdisk -l
well how do you think about this plan.