USB Flash Drive media handling and using.
Straight_Man
Geeky, in my own wayNaples, FL Icrontian
This thread will probably say I am crawling out from under my stone-ageness rocks somewhat yesterday and today in buying my first Flash drives (the USB dongle things) from Newegg yesterday. I am not trolling, rather totally inexperienced with these things.
Newegg had/has a deal on SanDisk Cruzer 16 GB USB 2.0 Flash drives, at $14.99 each. So, I ordered 4(without the bundle).
While they are coming, some questions....
First, they act like virtual CD-R/W or DVD-RAM drives do, right??? OR giant floppy disks, right?? Next, do they have to be formatted to use??? Can they be formatted NTFS if so?? Do they have to be partitioned, or do they act like they have one partition per USB Flash drive/dongle/stick built-in??? The capacity, unlike mechanical HDs, is in true GB, right???
NB: I know I could wait and not embarrass myself and not maybe look like a troll to those who use these things day in and day out, but am always wanting to be forearmed with knowledge rather than screw up backups or recovery stuff only to find out too late it is FUBARed/broken. Any help appreciated....
John.
Newegg had/has a deal on SanDisk Cruzer 16 GB USB 2.0 Flash drives, at $14.99 each. So, I ordered 4(without the bundle).
While they are coming, some questions....
First, they act like virtual CD-R/W or DVD-RAM drives do, right??? OR giant floppy disks, right?? Next, do they have to be formatted to use??? Can they be formatted NTFS if so?? Do they have to be partitioned, or do they act like they have one partition per USB Flash drive/dongle/stick built-in??? The capacity, unlike mechanical HDs, is in true GB, right???
NB: I know I could wait and not embarrass myself and not maybe look like a troll to those who use these things day in and day out, but am always wanting to be forearmed with knowledge rather than screw up backups or recovery stuff only to find out too late it is FUBARed/broken. Any help appreciated....
John.
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I think one of the first things I will do is put Mint on one, Ubuntu and the UBCD utilities on another. I only have my boxes here to play with, the slim ones some folks call laptops... So I do NOT want to try to build dual booting Linux and Win7 on one and lose my recovery partition and Win7 boot.
The oldest one, a faithful 8-9 year old Lenovo laptop, has Fedora 16 from a DVD install on it right now. I tried a lot of Linuxes on it to get everything working out of box. I could have sped up the experiments had I had these kinds of drives before.
I think a third will have all the stuff from the recovery partition on my newest laptop on it.
Thanks for chiming in, good to have stuff confirmed and proven different than I thought before I ruin things accidentally. In my older age, dislike messing stuff up worse accidentally and having more to fix.
Mageia behaves well, and Firefox 9.0.1 behaves on both boxes in Mageia (Mageia .rpm in Testing/Cauldron for Firefox 9.0.1). As to too much space (about 15 true GB on nominal 16 GB flash drive), the Linux install in the W520 flash drive is using about 10.7 true GB now.