Format USB(flash drive) From Terminal

It's easy to format usb drives from terminal. But, you need to first find what's your usf file system. To find this we can use df command.

df: report file system disk space usage 

Also, to be able to format the usb, usb shouldn't be mount, if it is we are going to unmount it.

Now, just to be clear I am going to format my own usb step by step, at required steps I will give the terminal screenshots.

Steps I have down:

      1. type df command into terminal

terminal output:

mustafa@mustafa-Lenovo-G550 ~ $ df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda2 40794700 24120308 14602124 63% / udev 996512 4 996508 1% /dev tmpfs 402288 1008 401280 1% /run none 5120 0 5120 0% /run/lock none 1005716 276 1005440 1% /run/shm none 102400 8 102392 1% /run/user /dev/sda3 154622972 133789684 20833288 87% /media/mustafa/6266637866634BBB /dev/sda6 27667488 17288020 8974028 66% /media/mustafa/b7b4896e-1570-4477-8535-31b2a6c7f8a5


     2. Plug in usb (flash drive)
     3. type df command into terminal

termainal output:

mustafa@mustafa-Lenovo-G550 ~ $ df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda2 40794700 24122360 14600072 63% / udev 996512 4 996508 1% /dev tmpfs 402288 1008 401280 1% /run none 5120 0 5120 0% /run/lock none 1005716 276 1005440 1% /run/shm none 102400 8 102392 1% /run/user /dev/sda3 154622972 133789684 20833288 87% /media/mustafa/6266637866634BBB /dev/sda6 27667488 17288020 8974028 66% /media/mustafa/b7b4896e-1570-4477-8535-31b2a6c7f8a5 /dev/sdb 7801448 2044868 5756580 27% /media/mustafa/A875-7CDC

As you can see we have a new entry at the last row, which is should be my usb. It's file system is given as /dev/sdb at terminal output of df command.

    4.  to unmount the flash drive type: sudo umount /dev/sdb

    5.  to format the usb as fat type: sudo mkfs.vfat -I /dev/sdb

You can see the terminal executions of step 4 and 5 below:  

root@mustafa-Lenovo-G550:~# sudo -s root@mustafa-Lenovo-G550:~# umount /dev/sdb root@mustafa-Lenovo-G550:~# mkfs.vfat -I /dev/sdb mkfs.vfat 3.0.9 (31 Jan 2010) root@mustafa-Lenovo-G550:~# that's it we are done!

That's it we are done, I hope it helps..

If you have any question or need some help about format usb drives, leave a comment below.