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.
Step 1 – Insert USB and Identify Volume
Insert USB drive into your system and identify your USB drive correctly. This is the step you need to take care, because you may format the wrong disk if not correctly identify your disk.
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
Now, I have identified the drive /dev/sdc1, is my attached 16GB USB drive.
Step 2 – Format USB Drive in Linux
Whenever we attach a USB drive in Ubuntu, it automatically mounted to the system. We can not format any disk on Linux systems which are already mounted. So first un-mount /dev/sdc1 USB drive on your system.
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 the Windows operating system.
- Format with vFat File System
sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdc1 - Format with NTFS File System
sudo mkfs.ntfs /dev/sdc1 - Format with EXT4 File System
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdc1
Similarly, you can format USB Flash drive with any required file system.
I tried to format a 32gb usb stick in NTFS file system with this option, but after the format the flash drive is only 2gb, how can i change this back to it’s original size?
What will happen if you do not umount the drive and write over it with dd? Thanks
# Format fat32
sudo umount /dev/xxx
sudo apt install dosfstools
sudo df -h
sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/xxx
bash: mkfs.vfat: command not found
You ARE root (sudo)?
sduo umount /dev/sdc1
umount: /dev/adc1: not mounted
sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdc1
mkfs.vfat: unale to open /dev/sdc1: Device or resource busy
How can it be busy if it’s not mounted and how do I fix this?
Maybe a process has opened a file there and has not correctly deallocated the resource. You can check with lsof /dev/sdd1 (device name may change) and kill the culprit.
can I partition a JFS ?
Easier than right click and format? NOT
Can I use Ex-Fat formatted pendrive in linux?
For quick operation, you can add the ‘-Q’ option, it will perform a quick-format.
This will skip both zeroing of the volume and bad sector checking, none of which are needed for a drive in good health when erasing non-sensitive data 😉
where do you add the -Q in the command line, before, after, in the middle. What should the command look like?
Hi. Example:
sudo mkfs.ntfs -Q /dev/sdc1
Takes some time to format, but it works.
Im using this to format usb to then create live LLite 3.8 iso
Thank you Rahul, its a great tip !
sudo mkfs.vfat -n VOLUME-NAME /dev/sdb1
Thanks from a newbie
I used this method to format a 500 GB hard Drive. It took a while but worked great. Thanks
Hi dear RAHUL K
very nic
simple and complet
thanks
hello, it works really well. just follow instructions and don’t forget to start with umount command first.
Tanks.
Really useful and concise, thanks.
Worked well in Linux Lite 3.6 32bit.
It dealt with two drives that got wrecked in Windows 7 and that Windows 7 would then not format properly.
/Dev/sdb1 is mounted
Then it says..
Refusing to make a filesystem here !
??
Hi Bikashjit,
Please paste exact error here.
Use this command: sudo umount /dev/sdb1
This will unmount it so you can overwrite it.
Thanks, was looking for this. and I found out that with the -n option you can give a name to the drive, for instance:
[[email protected] mahler]# mkfs.vfat -n mahler /dev/sdc1
And your key will be labeled “mahler”
Hey thanks I used my quite overpowered 128GB flash drive to install my current linux distro. And it was seeing it as a 1.5GB file system. That I couldn’t write to. But your tutorial helped me out a lot as it’s a 124GB. I am guessing 4gb was used for the file system itself.
its saying /dev/sdc1 file not found…
Make sure instead of using what ever was in the tutorial use what ever the df -h gave you for example mine was sdb1
Awesome, Thanks for the info!
tks! it help me a lot! pretty simple and direct.
This was great thanks, quick question; how to you format a flash drive if it was in 2 partitions and make it one again? I lost the small partition.
I could not get Partitionmanager or GParted to work. This worked great, however. (I formatted a 3TB USB drive as ext4, for use as a backup drive)
Your article is misnamed. It’s “Format USB in UBUNTU” . If your article is proprietary to Ubuntu, that is what you should call it.
All the commands listed in the article are common for all the Linux distros.
I used these commands with Fedora and they worked just fine
nice description.thanks.
Thnks for the steps!!!
Were of great help!!! 🙂