Messed up USB stick doesn't show in blkid

Posted by Felix on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Felix
Published on 2010-04-04T11:45:03Z Indexed on 2010/04/04 11:53 UTC
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Filed under:

ubuntu

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memorystick

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formatting

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block-device

I was playing around with a USB stick (booting archlinux with qemu off of it and trying to perform an installation on the same stick at the same time -- brave, I know, but I was just messing around).

Now, after failing to boot and install at the same time, it seems I have sort of messed up my stick. What I think happened is that I used cfdisk to wipe everything on it and create one big partition, but formatting it then failed, so now there's a big partition with no filesystem.

Just to make it clear: I'm not worried for my stick, I know I can recover it at any point.

What I find intriguing is that after plugging the stick into my computer (using Ubuntu), there's no (terminal) way to find out what block device (/dev/sdx) it has associated. The only way I could determine that was with GParted:

GParted showing /dev/sdc

But blkid shows the following:

/dev/sda1: UUID="12F695CFF695B387" LABEL="System Reserved" TYPE="ntfs" 
/dev/sda2: UUID="A0BAA6EABAA6BC62" TYPE="ntfs" 
/dev/sdb1: UUID="546aec8b-9ad6-4571-b07a-adba63e25820" TYPE="ext4" 
/dev/sdb2: UUID="2a8b82d8-6c6e-4053-a446-bab970d93d7c" TYPE="swap" 
/dev/sdb3: UUID="7cbede7d-c930-4e59-9d1b-01f2d79bd092" TYPE="ext4"

No trace of /dev/sdc. My question is: if I didn't have a graphical interface (to use GParted), how would I have known which block device is my stick?

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