Uly.me

cloud engineer

Linux Format USB Drive

Here’s how to format a USB drive on Linux.

Plug in the USB drive to see mount point.

# scan for all drives
df -Th
Filesystem     Type     Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc1      fuseblk   30G   66M   30G   1% /media/ulysses/451B99AF225B48EC

Unmount USB drive.

umount /dev/sdc1

Choose a file system type and run the appropriate format command.

# nfts format
mkfs.ntfs /dev/sdc1
# vfat format
mkfs.vfat /dev/sdc1
# ext4 format
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdc1

Determine USB Format Type

Here’s how to determine what type of USB format a thumb drive is in Linux.

  • df -Th (shows the file system type)
  • lsblk (shows the block devices)
  • lsusb (show usb ports and devices)
  • fdisk -l (displays the USB format type)

To display, use “fdisk -l” to display either NTFS, FAT32 or exFAT32.

Linux Mint 19.1

Just got done installing Linux Mint 19.1 Tessa Cinnamon edition. It’s a long-term support release with support until 2023. Here are some of the new features. I use Etcher on the Mac to write to the USB. I then booted via USB to install Linux Mint on the new machine. Linux Mint was done installing in less than 10 minutes. I went with Cinnamon since it was a darker theme.

Linux Mint 19 Cinnamon

Etcher

Etcher allows you to safely and easily burn images to SD and USB drives. It has a simple interface, and and exclusively available on the Mac OS platform. Burning an image has never been easy. Just select an image (ISO), select a drive, and flash the image.

Etcher interface