Ubuntu is a very powerful Linux Operating System as many of you know who read my blogs and articles that I am a big Linux user and I try to do everything in Linux before I would ever break down and do it in Windows. Well here is some information I thought you might find interesting about formatting a USB drive within Ubuntu.
*Disclaimer – You have to be sure that you know what you are doing when you execute the commands that I show you here because you can erase your entire hard drive if you do this wrong. I take absolutely no responsibility for how you use this information, I am supplying it to you strictly as on an informational bases. MikeNet PC and I are not responsible for anything you do to damage your computer or another’s computer. *
There are two ways that I will describe to perform this operation, what I call the hard way and the easy way.
The Hard Way
You need to first make sure that your USB drive is not mounted. You can do this by simply by right clicking on your USB drive icon on your desktop and choosing “Unmount Volume”.
Next open up and terminal window. *Here you will need to know the media name of your USB Drive. If you do not then move on to the easy way because if you choose the wrong media you could erase your hard drive. My media is /dev/sdb1
From the terminal window you are going to type:
sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1
sudo e2label /dev/sdb1 usb-drive
and you are done. Now on to the Easy Way
The Easy Way
First we will have to install GParted to our computer if we don’t already have it. Assuming you have access to the internet type:
sudo apt-get install gparted
You will have to enter your admin password but gparted will be downloaded and then installed on your computer. Once the installation has completed go to System >> Administration >> Partition Editor and this will launch GParted.
In the top right hand corner of the window you will see all of your physical media listed in a drop down menu, select the one for your USB drive, mine is /dev/sdb and it will then show you all the partitions for that media.
Right click on your partition and choose “Unmount” to unmount the volume and then right click and choose “Format to” and I will normally select FAT32 so that I can use my USB drive interchangeably between Windows and Linux.
Last but not least click the green check to apply changes and this will format your USB Drive. Once that is done remove your USB drive and reinsert to into your computer and you are ready to go.