On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 12:52 +0530, Nikhil Marathe wrote:
I chose fs number 83 in the cfdisk menu. cfdisk only says Linux so i have no idea whether its ext2/3.
83 is a partition label identifying that the disk partition is meant for a "valid" Linux filesystem. Likewise 82 is for Linux swap.
After creating the partition you still *need* to format the partition with mkfs -t <type> (man mkfs for details).
From your response, apparently you have not formatted the partition
after creating it with fdisk/cfdisk. You probably have some old filesystem that the Linux kernel is recognizing and auto mounting it.
To verify that the USB drive is good: Caveat: back up any valuable files before doing this test.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1 count=256000000
where /dev/sda is the device your USB drive is recognized as by the kernel.
This will write 256MB (in disk manufac. parlance) on the disk. Likewise you can also read from USB drive (man dd for details). dd will fail if it encounters HW errors.
HTH