How to format USB drive in Linux Mint 14 with GUI?

Question

I've just installed Linux Mint 14. Now I need to format my USB drive, but I'm not getting any option to do that.

How can I do that with a GUI?

Answer 1

You can use graphical tools to achieve this, such as GParted. You can install this like so:

apt-get update
apt-get install gparted

Your OS may also include a graphical package manager, if so, you can alternatively install the gparted package from there.

After gparted is installed, run it. Select your flash drive (be careful, make sure it is the right device by checking the size, name, and existing partitions), and delete all of the existing partitions. Then, create a new filesystem that spans the disk, and tell gparted to format it to ext4 (which is probably the filesystem you want), then click OK.

Command line alternative

Alternatively, you can also do this with fdisk and the filesystem's mkfs tool. Assuming the relevant block device is /dev/sdb (check using fdisk -l and/or blkid, it is very possible that it is not) and you want to format to ext4 (you probably do):

# Create partition scheme
fdisk /dev/sdb << 'EOF'
o
n
p
1


w
EOF
# Format partition 1
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1

If you only want one partition, it is also possible to create it with no partition table:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb