Hello the list! I have gotten myself all turned around and confused on this supposedly simple topic, so I'm hoping for a little bit of advice.
I have a USB stick I have previously used as a boot medium for Debian installers and live systems. Now I want to wipe it and repurpose it to being a generic place to store data for portability between systems. The key criterion is that it should be maximally compatible -- I want to be able to read and ideally write the stick on Debian, OSX for Mac users and Windows (7 and later). It's a 4GB stick and I am thinking of using all the space in a single partition. Can someone tell me what partition type I should select in cfdisk (or what better tool I should use to partition) and what command I should use to create a file system on the stick using my Jessie box, that I can then write some files to the stick from the Jessie box and expect my friend's MacBook to be able to read them? (text files, so if it can read the file system we are golden). I have tried in the past to format USB sticks using Jessie (although unfortunately I am coming up blank on the commands I used, it was a while ago) and have often found that Mac users get nowhere with the result. They plug the stick in and I believe the Mac just doesn't acknowledge it is even there (although I haven't witnessed exactly what happens, as I don't own a Mac myself, but more than one person has chucked a stick back at me saying it was no good [different sticks, so the issue is the preparation method not the stick itself]) Thanks and sorry for the simple question! Google didn't turn up much on this as most sticks come ready to use and there is less to be said about "re-formatting" a stick after it's had an image written to it... Mark
