I know that others have touched on this subject already, but the
easiest way that I have found for someone who is knew to work with the
disk drives and anything that can be mounted, like your USB drive, is
by using the software "gnome disks". You can install it by running sudo
apt install gnome-disk-utility in your terminal, and it will show up in
you menu. Just select the USB drive from the list on the left, and then
click the hamburger menu at the top right and it will give you a drop
down list of a few different things, one in particular is the "format
option"
I know that gparted is a great tool, but you can do just about
everything that you can do in it, inside of the more "user friendly"
disks utility. I have been using it for a long time now, and haven't
ever had the need to use gparted over disks, except for in situations
that "disks" isn't available.
Cheers!
On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 6:04 pm, Victor Forberger
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 1/10/20 5:47 PM, Spackman, Chris wrote:
On 2020/01/08 at 03:47am, John wrote:
I can't find the format option when I right click the USB drive.
Eventually,I can't format the drive.
I also can't rename the USB drive.
Disclaimer: I'm not in front of my Xubuntu box right now, so I'm
going
from memory.
I would suggest installing GParted and using that. There might be a
more
new-user friendly method, though, so if you install and open
GParted and
get intimidated, maybe wait for a better answer. Please be careful -
used carelessly, gparted can reformat your main drive, which would
probably ruin your day.
That said, GParted is pretty easy to use. Select the usb drive from
the
drop down menu at the top right. Right click on the area showing the
drive space / partitions. Choose "format to" and then the file
system
type that you want. Usual choices are vfat (fat32 I think it is
called?)
if you plan to use the usb drive on other, non-Linux, computers
(such as
MS Windows or Apple Macs). If it is just for use on Linux, ext3 or
ext4
are good choices.
To give the usb stick a name, use the "Label" or "Name" fields when
you
format it (I honestly forget which one it is - Label, I think, but
not
sure.)
For most straight-forward stuff like reformatting, GParted doesn't
do
anything until you tell it to. So, for example, if you have selected
"Format to => fat32" and added a label, it won't actually do
anything
until you go to "Edit => Apply All Actions". Then, it will do it.
Until
you do that, you can cancel / undo and redo all you like until you
get
everything like you want. After you click "Apply All Actions", you
cannot undo.
But, like I said, please be careful. Double and triple check that
you
have chosen the correct drive before you apply any changes. Read any
messages that GParted gives you very carefully and don't click
anything
if you don't understand what it is telling you.
As noted above, gparted is the answer. Volume info and formatting
cannot
be done from the desktop.
You may need to install additional drivers/libraries depending on your
usb stick. Gparted will prompt you about the missing
drivers/libraries.
For more info, see the help section on formatting a drive at
<https://docs.xubuntu.org/1804/user/C/hardware-devices.html#disks-partitions>.
- Victor
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blog: http://linuxatty.wordpress.com <http://linuxatty.wordpress.com/>
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