USB from nothing

A few weeks ago, a team of German researchers demonstrated that USB keys are not safe, even after reformatting! I suppose that SD cards are also affected.

The -I option is needed because the Linux mkfs tools will not normally create a filesystem on an unpartitioned device (except for a floppy disk, if you remember those). Generally, running mkfs on a whole disk is likely to be a mistake that could wipe out your whole drive, so it's not allowed by default; using -I overrides this safeguard. If you want to partition the device, you will need to use fdisk to create a single partition filling the whole space and then run the above command without the -I and with sdb1 instead of sdb.

However, you would probably find it easier to use GParted to do the whole partition and format job in one go. If your distro doesn’t have GParted installed by default, it will be in its software library. Note that you need GParted,