[LINUX] Format USB Drive in the Terminal

1. Insert your USB drive into your system.

2. Open the terminal. (CTRL + ALT + T)

3. Look for the USB drive you want to format, by running:

df

The command above will display the directory path of your various drives. Take note of the drive you wish to format.


In this tutorial, the name of the drive am going to format is Seth and its path under the filesystem is /dev/sdc1.

NOTE: if df can not  list your usb drive you can use the following command: 
dmesk | tail

3. Unmount drive using the syntax below:
with root administrator:

umount /dev/sdc1

4. Now run this command to format drive to fat32:

mkfs.vfat -n 'Ubuntu' -I /dev/sdc1

Understanding the above command

mkfs
mkfs is used to build a Linux filesystem on a device, usually a hard disk partition. The device argument is either the device name (e.g. /dev/hda1, /dev/sdb2), or a regular file that shall contain the filesystem. The size argument is the number of blocks to be used for the filesystem.

vfat
Formats the drive to FAT32, other formats available are mkfs.bfs, mkfs.ext2, mkfs.ext3, mkfs.ext4, mkfs.minix, mkfs.msdos, mkfs.vfat, mkfs.xfs, mkfs.xiafs etc.

-n
Volume-name sets the volume name (label) of the file system. The volume name can be up to 11 characters long. The default is no label. In this tutorial my volume-name is Ubuntu.

-I
It is typical for fixed disk devices to be partitioned so by default, you are not permitted to create a filesystem across the entire device.

Running df after formatting displays this.



You are done and your pen drive has successfully been formatted.


Source: http://www.unixmen.com/how-to-format-usb-drive-in-the-terminal/