Format a USB flash drive using gpart

[Warren Block]

On Sat, 7 Jul 2012, Carmel wrote:

> This is probably a dumb question, but does gpart even work on a USB
> flash drive? I have not been able to figure out how to do it. I want to
> erase the entire drive and format it for a FreeBSD UFS2 file system.

Yes, gpart will work with pretty much any storage device.

If you want the drive to be bootable, it needs boot blocks.  This is 
easier with GPT than MBR.  For an 8G drive:

# gpart create -s gpt da0
# gpart add -t freebsd-boot -s 512k da0
# gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptboot -i 1 da0
# gpart add -t freebsd-ufs -b 1M -s 7G da0
# gpart add -t freebsd-swap da0
# newfs -U /dev/da0p2