Yeah, I know it sounds simple, but there’s nothing in the online help.
Firstly, you need to figure out which device your USB drive is. Devices in Unix are represented as files in the /dev directory; this includes disk drives. On my system I have an IDE hard drive (/dev/hda), a SATA drive and a USB flash drive, both of which are represented as SCSI drives (/dev/sd*). The quick answer is that the SATA drive was installed first, and is /dev/sda; the flash drive is /dev/sdb. If you want to double-check, you can start the “Hardware” application (AKA “Device Manager”), which is in the /System/Administration Gnome menu. If you plug in the USB drive while Device Manager’s open, you’ll see a flurry of activity under one of your USB controllers. A series of entries will appear, one of the lowest level ones will say “USB2FlashStorage”. If you click on that, and click on the “Advanced” tab on the right hand side, you should see an entry marked “block.device”; in my case it’s set to /dev/sdb.
The only way I could find to format the disk was through the command line - there’s no fancy right-click functionality. The command I used was:
mkfs -V /dev/sdb
…which means “Make a file system, be verbose when you do so (show me every status message), and do so on /dev/sdb, my flash drive”. You’ll notice I haven’t specified a filesystem - in this case I wanted to use EXT2, which is the default. If I wanted to use EXT3, I’d type:
mkfs -V -t ext3 /dev/sdb
…where the “t” is the option for “type”. There are options for Microsoft formats as well; but I’d suggest formatting on a Windows box to avoid any incompatibilities.
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