New DPSM Website

The Department of Physical Sciences and Mathematics (DPSM), of the College of Arts and Sciences, University of the Philippines Manila has a new website. It’s at http://dpsm.cas.upm.edu.ph.  The new site is running under Joomla 1.5.2 with template provided by JoomlaShack.

Flash Disk Suddenly Failed

I was transferring the ISO image file of Ubuntu 8.06 to my 1GB flash disk when suddenly, an error message came out and told me that the flash disk is already full. I checked again and the flash disk should had enough space. Worse, the flash disk didn’t contain any trace of any copy of the ISO file but it seems that 400MB is used up. Faced with this problem, I decided to just format the flash disk with my Windows laptop. Unfortunately, formatting failed and the flash disk was left useless!!! I tried formatting it with another Windows machine and it failed again!!!

Fortunately, when I got home, I found this site on how to format a flash disk under Linux. Under an Ubuntu Linux machine, I inserted the flash disk, then type

fdisk /dev/hda

I was asked to enter an option, and I typed n in order to create a new partition on the flash disk and x to write the partition and exit. I then typed

mkfs -t vfat /dev/sda1

to format the newly created partition for FAT32 file format and IT WORKS!!! I can now use the flash disk on Windows and Linux.