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 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 a 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 the 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.