# [SOLVED] Formatting a USB in Ubuntu 11.10?



## ENCOM OS-12 (May 4, 2011)

Had a bit of trouble with this. Eventually I tried the Disk Utility and after a bit of trouble at first I finally managed to format a USB.

So, evidently unless you break out the terminal or attempt with Disk Utility, its kinda difficult to format a USB in Ubuntu 11.10.

You can sort of do it with the Startup disk software but not exactly. What if one wants FAT32? Any good software I could use?


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## wmorri (May 29, 2008)

*Re: Formatting a USB in Ubuntu 11.10?*

Hi,

I haven't used Ubuntu in a while, but I have always found good luck with GParted. This program should allow you to format your flash drive without any problems.


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## ENCOM OS-12 (May 4, 2011)

*Re: Formatting a USB in Ubuntu 11.10?*

Gparted is evil. Never can do what I want to do with it. I just havent had much luck with it.


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## hal8000 (Dec 23, 2006)

*Re: Formatting a USB in Ubuntu 11.10?*

Formatting a USB in Ubuntu or linux is as easy as make filesystem (mkfs).
mkfs and tab will show you all the filesystem types you can use:

[[email protected] ~]$ mkfs
mkfs mkfs.ext3 mkfs.jfs mkfs.ntfs mkfs.vfat
mkfs.cramfs mkfs.ext4 mkfs.minix mkfs.reiserfs mkfs.xfs
mkfs.ext2 mkfs.ext4dev mkfs.msdos mkfs.udffs

To format a USB drive all you need to know is its name, this can be found by
typing df at a terminal:

[[email protected] ~]$ df -hT
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
--snip
/dev/sdc1 ext3 3.6G 3.3G 134M 97% /media/disk


In the above example my USB is sdc1 and is a 4G USB stick. As you can see
I changed it from NTFS to ext3.

FAT32 and NTFS are weak filesystems, not only are they prone to losing data but also
require constant defragging. Most linux filesystems (except ext2) are journalled. Thye never require defragging and have better security- the disadvantage is that if you format a USB memory stick as ext3 it cant be read under windows.

To answer your earlier question,

mkfs.vfat /dev/sdc1
mkfs.ntfs /dev/sdc1

would make FAT32 and NTFS filesystems on a memory stick called sdc1
Hope that helps.


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## ENCOM OS-12 (May 4, 2011)

*Re: Formatting a USB in Ubuntu 11.10?*

Wow, this seriously does help, thanks.


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