Go to TogaWare.com Home Page. GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide
by Graham Williams
Duck Duck Go



CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE UPDATED SURVIVAL GUIDE

Format a USB Thumb Drive

20180527 As an example I had an old 16GB USB thumb drive that I wanted to make use of. It had already been partitioned in some way but could not be mounted and I was unable to determine its contents. Perhaps it had become corrupted in some way (which could be a sign that it is not reliable, so best no to use it for archival purposes). I plugged it in and used gnome-disks to determine the device name after selecting the 16 GB Thumb Drive (San Disk Cruzer Slice) entry from amongst the identified disks. The device was /dev/sde1. Since we may want to use this same USB thumb drive in different computers we will format it with an NTFS file system. Thus:

  $ sudo mkfs.ntfs /dev/sde1
  Cluster size has been automatically set to 4096 bytes.
  Initializing device with zeroes: 100% - Done.
  Creating NTFS volume structures.
  mkntfs completed successfully. Have a nice day.
This took quite some time given the zero wipe of the disk (writing zeros to the disk to reduce the possibility of data breach).


Support further development by purchasing the PDF version of the book.
Other online resources include the Data Science Desktop Survival Guide.
Books available on Amazon include Data Mining with Rattle and Essentials of Data Science.
Popular open source software includes rattle and wajig.
Hosted by Togaware, a pioneer of free and open source software since 1984.
Copyright © Togaware Pty Ltd. . Creative Commons ShareAlike V4.