How to rename and format a flash drive?

[joe at actionline.com]

How can I rename and format my cruzer 2-gig flash drive so I can install a
live distro?

Searching the 'net, I found pendrivelinux.com which offered a "Universal"
pen drive installer. When tried to use it, it couldn't see my flash drive.
I then found the instructions shown below to "Restore a USB Key to it's
original state."

All seemed to work well, until step #7: "umount /dev/sdx" ... fdisk
originally identified my flash drive by the name: sdf ... but after step
#7 did not work, the installer said that I should reboot the computer so
the flash drive would be recognized.  When I did that, the flash drive
then showed up as sdb1 (which didn't seem right) and the system now sees
it as a "DVD" drive and I can't do anything with it.

So, how can I rename this flash drive back to "sdf" and reformat it so I
can use it to install a Linux live iso?

   www.pendrivelinux.com/restoring-your-usb-key-partition/
To restore a flash pen drive to it's original state.
A. First delete the old partitions that remain on the USB key.
 1. Open a terminal and type sudo su
 2. Type fdisk -l and note your USB drive letter.
 3. Type fdisk /dev/sdx (replacing x with your drive letter)
 4. Type d to delete a partition
 5. Type 1 to select the 1st partition and press enter
 6. Type d to delete another partition (fdisk will select the second)

B. Next we need to create the new partition.
 1. Type n to make a new partition
 2. Type p to make this partition primary and press enter
 3. Type 1 to make this the first partition and then press enter
 4. Press enter to accept the default first cylinder
 5. Press enter again to accept the default last cylinder
 6. Type w to write the new partition information to the USB key

*** everything from this point on did not work ***

 7. Type umount /dev/sdx (replacing x with your drive letter)

C. Last step: create the fat filesystem.
 1. Type mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdx1 replace x with your USB key drive ltr

You now have a restored USB key with a single fat 16 partition.

*** And the flash drive is useless at this point. ***