How to Format my disc

[eynestyne]

What is the easiest way to format my flash drive?

Thanks

[Ole Juul]

Re: How to Format my disc

I prefer cfdisk for ease of use and effectiveness but lots of people like and recommend gparted. However, you didn't say what file system you wanted. The best choice is dependent on what you want to use the drive for. Commonly people like to use them for carrying files around and that means that a lot of fs choices won't work because the target machines have limited fs capability. This is one reason that the fat system is generally used. Here is how you do that:

fdisk /dev/sda
mkfs -t vfat /dev/sda1

Remember to first check what your flash drive is called. It could be sda1 or even sdb. Type "fdisk -l" to find out.

BTW: this subject is very well covered all over the place - do a net search.

[eynestyne]

Re: How to Format my disc

Thanks a lot Ole Juul..
I was just kinda use to right clicking and selecting format.

[NeverwherE]

Re: How to Format my disc

Run live disk image, and run the installed software there. Should be kde partition manager. If not installed, and you want to format a flash drive, another drive on the computer, or just a seperate drive alltogether, then just sudo apt-get install partition-manager. That's what I use, and yeah, it sucks that you can't just right click, and format like you can in gnome, or windows. Aparently kde does not have this feature. What I did, is add the option in Device actions, to include kde partition manager to be selectable when inserting a removable drive. This would just be a shortcut to going in to the kicker panel and selecting the app from applications tab. Just remember to close out kde partition manager before formating another drive, because it doesn't seem to remember already formated drives. This process is so much easier in gnome, but that's because it uses some software bits, that are also used for gparted, whether it is installed or not on your system.