Mageia forum

Hello

I had followed the guide on installing via a USB stick perfectly and it did indeed work. However, now I'm trying to empty the USB stick so I can use it again. I followed the steps on the wikia page, but it did not work fully. I can only put about 30 images on the USB stick and nothing else. So basically, I can only use about 1 GB of space out of the 16GB that I have. I tried the step three more times, then Disc Utility and then I tried formating via Windows but I'm denied access now! So I reboot my computer and found that the USB is not unallocated! So I allocated it via Window's run command and now it can be formated, but it returns me back to the "small space" problem from before.

Did Mageia 3 ruin my USB stick?

Any and all help is greatly appreciated, thanks!

My stick is a Toshiba 16GB USB

What you need to do in disc utility is not only format it, but delete the partition and create a new one over the whole stick, then format it.
Also, which steps on which wiki page did you follow exactly?

Dragonborn wrote:Hello

Did Mageia 3 ruin my USB stick?

NO! You didn't ruin it.

You cannot access most Linux filesystems in Windows! Secondly, format the whole USB stick as Fat32.


Connect the disk to your computer. Open a terminal/konsole. Find it with "fdisk -l" (dev/sdXX) )and make sure it is not mounted. Then format the whole thing as Fat32.
You can use "mkfs" or "mkdosfs".

Perhaps you need to install dosfstools.

You can use diskdrake (or Control Centre -> Local disks -> Manage disk partitions) to delete the partition, create a new one (which fills the disk) and format it as Fat32.

Be very careful that you are working on the USB stick and not on your hard drive!
Run diskdrake without the stick plugged in and make a note of the drives, then plug in the stick and run it again: a new drive should appear which is your USB stick.