How to Format an USB Drive From Terminal

Formatting an USB-stick is a pretty easy task to do, it can be done in multiple ways, like using File managers, GUI disk utility applications like Disks, GParted etc. It can also be done fairly easily from terminal and this blog will show you how to.

Which File System You Are Going To Use

The file systems you can use for formatting a USB drive differ by maximum file size and operating system compatibility. The most commonly used file systems when formatting a USB drive are

FAT32
NTFS
exFAT

As FAT32 offers the most compatibility, we will format our drive with FAT32 File System.

Formatting an USB drive will erase all the data stored in it, please backup all the important data before formatting.

Formatting the Drive

Formatting the USB Drive is a fairly easy process to do from the terminal, it consists 3 steps -

Locate the drive
Format the drive
Verify the formatting process

Step 1: Locate The USB Drive

To locate the drive we wille be using a terminal utlity called df, it lists all mounted partitions in your computer. And to get more of a human readable output, execute the following command in your terminal

df -h

Indentify the USB Drive from the list and find the corresponding device. In this case it is listed as /dev/sda1

df output

If you are not sure about which is your USB Drive, you can just unplug and replug the USB device and find out out which device is listed after plugging in the USB.

Step 2: Unmount and Format the Device

Before formatting the drive we need to unmount it, it can be done by the command

sudo umount /dev/{your_device_name}

Where you need to replace {your_device_name} by the device name you found from the Step 1.

umount output

To format the drive to our desired File System we can execute either of the following commamds

FAT32

sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/{your_device_name} -n {NAME}

NTFS

sudo mkfs.ntfs /dev/{your_device_name} -n {NAME}

exFAT

sudo mkfs.exfat /dev/{your_device_name} -n {NAME}

Where you need to replace {your_device_name} by the device name you found from the Step 1 and you can name the drive by replacing {NAME} with any name you like or you can just opt out the -n {NAME} part from the commands.

In this exmaple we are formatting our drive in FAT32 file system, which is done by

sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sda1 -n PRANJAL

output mkfs

Step 3: Verify The Formatting

You can verify the formatting process with the following command

sudo fsck /dev/{your_device_name}

From the ouptut of the command we will know that

fsck output

It is indeed formatted in FAT (32 bit) file system, and with only 1 file, which is used to store the name of the drive that we have given.

Conclusion

In this article it shown how to format an USB drive to an specified file system from the terminal, follow the steps in the blog to simplify the process.

Pranjal Das