Formatting a USB in Linux is easier then burning an ISO and only needs a few quick commands!
What you will need 📋
- A USB drive
- A computer with Linux 🐧🖥
- The ability to read instructions and to follow them 🧠
Formatting the USB
- The first thing you want to do is plug in your USB stick and identify the USB stick's name.
lsblk
Normally the USB will be something like sdX; a tip on identifying it is by looking at the size of the USB in the table that lsblk gives you!
- Now you need to use a program called fdisk that will allow you to create a new partition table for the USB, this will format the USB.
sudo fdisk /dev/sdX
You will need to press the following keys to make a new partition table for the USB.
- o - Creates a new DOS partition table
- n - New partition, press enter to all that follows
- w - Writes the partition table
Give fdisk a minute to write the new partition to the USB.
- Now is the time to give that partition a file system. You should look into this beforehand to see what file system you want, but I will use fat32 because it works with all operating systems.
sudo mkfs.fat -F 32 -n "Backup-USB" /dev/sdXx
The small x represents the number of the partition; the -L flag is used to give the USB stick a name.
Finished ✅
All done! Now you have an empty USB stick you can use for all your files!