Ubuntu
nautilus package

formatting USB hard drive

Asked by AnthonyC

I am trying to format a USB hard drive from feisty. The drive shows up as "disc" on the desktop and I can see that it reads all the files. But I want to erase and format the drive. How do I do that?

Question information

Language:
English Edit question
Status:
Solved
For:
Ubuntu nautilus Edit question
Assignee:
No assignee Edit question
Solved by:
Benoit Malet
Solved:
Last query:
Last reply:
Revision history for this message
Best Benoit Malet (benoit-malet) said : 		#1

Hello !

If you just want to erase everything on the disk, you can just click the icon, press CTRL+H (shows hidden files), select everything and suppress ...

If you really want to format, be warned that you have to choose a proper filesystem : if your USB drive is formatted in ext3fs (Linux FS), you won't be able to read it from Windows ...

To format it, you can use Gparted (GNOME partition editor), which is installed or available through Synaptic. On top right, you can select the drive you want to work on ... From this point, everything is graphical and quite intuitive ...

Hope this helps !

Regards,
Benoît

Revision history for this message
AnthonyC (anthonychristiansen-gmail) said : 		#2

Thanks Benoit Malet, that solved my question.

Revision history for this message
Iain Houston (iainhouston) said : 		#3

For some reason gparted ((Feisty AMD64)) would not allow any operations on my USB hard drive
I used graphical interface to unmount usb drive
I used dmesg | grep 'hd]a-z]: ' to determine device /dev/sda was the one (partition /dev/sda1)
I could have used sudo fdisk /dev/sda to make a partition but decided to overwrite existing
I used mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sda1 to format

Revision history for this message
BlueZircon (simon-gruening) said : 		#4

i had the same problem. You have to unmount it (the usb stick) first but don't pull it out.

ps. I know this answer is late but it's a top search result on google =)