How To Format USB Drive in Linux Command Line

Formatting a USB drive in Ubuntu using Terminal commands is much easier as formatting it in Windows systems. But few of Ubuntu users are not much familiar with terminal commands. This tutorial will help Ubuntu (Linux) users with the simple steps of USB Flash drive formatting.

1. Insert USB and Identify Volume

Insert USB drive into your system and identify your USB drive correctly. This is only step where you need to take care, because your may format wrong disk if not correctly identify your disk.

[email protected]:~$ df -h

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1       28G    24G  2.3G  92% /
udev            1.4G   12K  1.4G   1% /dev
tmpfs           277M  1.2M  276M   1% /run
none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none            1.4G   34M  1.4G   3% /run/shm
/dev/sdc1      14.8G  1.4G  13.4G  10% /media/tecadmin

2. Format USB Drive in Linux

When we attach any USB drive in Ubuntu system, it automatically mounted and we can not format ant disk on Linux systems which is already mounted. So first un-mount this USB drive using following command.

$ sudo umount /dev/sdc1

Now use one of the following commands as per file system you want. To format a USB drive, most of the users prefer VFAT and NTFS file systems because they can be easily used on Windows operating system.

Format with vFat FileSystem

$ sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdc1

Format with NTFS FileSystem

$ sudo mkfs.ntfs /dev/sdc1

Format with EXT4 FileSystem

$ sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdc1

Similarly, you can format USB Flash drive with any required file system.