USB flash drive support/usage

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2004-12-21 11:06, Dan Nelson <dnelson at allantgroup.com> wrote:
> In the last episode (Dec 21), Kenneth W Cochran said:
> > I have some questions about the little USB flash drives...
>
>> Apparently they come setup for a FAT32 filesystem - can I format them
>> for other filesystems (e.g. linux-ext2, BSD UFS/UFS2, MS NTFS) &
>> expect them to work reliably?
>
> You can, but FAT32 is definitely the most portable.

Formatting in UFS is possible indeed.  I usually have my email stored on
a 256 MB USB stick, formatted in UFS1 :-)

>> Assuming they work (well) with FreeBSD, how do I properly set them up
>> for UFS/UFS2?  Do I need to fdisk and {disk,bsd}label first?
>
> Just newfs on /dev/da# should be enough.  You can fdisk or disklabel if
> you want, but if you're not going to boot off it I don't think it buys
> you anything.

I used fdisk, bsdlabel and newfs.  The process is described here:
http://keramida.serverhive.com/weblog/archives/using-a-usb-20-flash-mini-disk-on-freebsd