How to Format Drives in Linux

Skip to the next paragraph if you don't want the story. So a while back I was riding around my neighborhood and found a computer in someones trash so I took it home and dismantled it.I took out the hard drive and graphics card, thankfully it was a SATA drive so I could easily plug it into my computer which is a desktop and took a look at it. Whoever it was that last owned the computer was obviously not aware that they had to run a virus scanner once in a while because when I tried to boot from the drive I got the blue screen of death and when I ran the virus scanner it found over 10 viruses and malware. In the end I formatted the drive in windows plugged IN my Linux flash drive and flashed Linux Mint to my new drive. And this is how I came to get Linux on my computer and to why I am writing this instructable

So this came about because i could not find an ible' on formatting flash/thumb drives in Linux so with a little research and some trial and error i got it to work.

Step 1:

Step 2: Linux

If you don't already have Linux installed I recommend Linux mint that is the distro that I run other popular ones are Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Open Suse, and Arch Linux.

some basic knowlege for those that mostly run windows, terminal is a command-line interface much like cmd.exe. to install a few small programs type sudo apt-get install this where this is the program you want to install for instalnce type this sudo apt-get install gimp this will install gimp an open source image editing program that i used to make the picture on this step with.

other commands include cd .. to move up in the directory tree dir to see what is in the file you are at cd FileName to change to that directory obviously the FileName is what file you are changing to. though we will not be using these as much as the apt-get command they can still be of use in the future.

Step 3: Install the Program

the program to install is called Parted Magic to install parted magic type sudo apt-get install gparted and press enter Linux might ask you for a password if so type it in and hit enter after a second it should be done. if you look in the administration tab in the menu you should find it called gparted.

Step 4: Open It

if you still have terminal open or you cant find it in the menu you can type sudo gparted to open it. because it is an administrative program you most likely will need to give your password

Step 5: Select a Flash Drive and Format

when you have gparted open look up in the top right corner you should see a drop down menu that lets you select the drive the button will be labeled /dev/sdx x is whatever the drive is labeled as click on that button and find your drive by size be careful it would be easy to mess up your hard drive. after you select your drive right click on it and select unmount if you haven't done so already when right click again and select format to than decide which format you want it to be than click apply. you can also use gparted to rename drives

congrats you have formatted a flash drive in Linux. if you have any questions, remarks, or criticisms please comment or PM me.