Thanks, I will experiment with a correctly partitioned USB stick and
with different block sizes. But could you please clarify the
following:
I don't think there's
really much you can do. There's no "quick format" option for
newfs_msdos
like there is on Windows.
I thought the difference between quick format and slow format was that
the latter overwrites the whole disk and the former only writes as
much as necessary to get a working filesystem. But it looks to me that
newfs_msdos actually doesn't write a lot. I did the following
experiment (didn't verify it with the USB stick yet): I generated a
binary file with a pattern of all bytes from 0 to 255 repeated 256
times. For the resulting 64K file, I configured a device with
vnconfig. Then I called newfs_msdos on the corresponding raw device.
Hexdump on the original file shows that only the bytes before
0x00004600 were overwritten, after that, the pattern is still there.
So I'm confused about how this is different from quick format.
Best regards
Stanislav Syekirin
