How to format USB drives on Linux, MacOS, and Windows | ZDNET

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I regularly use USB flash drives. Whether it's for installing Linux, carrying files with me, backing up certain important data, or any number of other reasons, those drives have become an important part of my digital life.

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Because of that, I need to know how to format them, no matter the operating system I have before me. To that end, I thought I'd walk you through the process of formatting such a drive on Linux, MacOS, and Windows.

Ready, steady -- let's go.

What you'll need: The only things you'll need for this are a running instance of Linux, a user with sudo privileges, and a USB flash drive.

Although it's fairly easy to format a USB flash drive on Linux from the command line, I'm going to show you how to do it from the GNOME Disks utility, because everyone likes a good GUI. I'll also add the directions for formatting from the command line as well.

The first step is to insert the USB drive into your Linux-powered desktop or laptop.

Next, open GNOME Disks (it might be called "Disks," depending on your distribution), and then select the USB flash drive you just plugged in from the sidebar.

With the drive selected, click the gear icon in the main pane and, from the drop-down, select Format Partition. In the resulting pop-up, give the drive a name, select the desired type (if you want to use this drive across different platforms, select FAT), and click Next. When prompted, click Format, and the process will begin and complete fairly quickly. Once it's done, close Disks, eject the drive, and you're ready to go.

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The GNOME Disks utility makes it easy to manage your drives.

If you want to know how to do this from the command line, here are the general steps:

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Where [device_name] is the name of the USB device found with the lsblk command. Note that you can format the drive to NTFS with mkfs.ntfs or exFAT with mkfs.exfat.

Here's how it's done on a MacOS desktop or laptop.

Insert the USB drive into your MacBook or iMac

Click the Launchpad icon on the dock, search for Disk Utility, and hit Enter on your keyboard to open the app.

Select the USB drive from the sidebar and then click Erase in the top toolbar. You'll then be prompted to give the drive a name and select the format. You can also click Security Options and adjust the security level of the drive (which defines how much effort the utility will put into erasing the data that's on the drive). Click Erase and the process will begin and finish fairly quickly.

Formatting a USB drive on MacOS is incredibly simple.

You can then close Disk Utility and safely eject the drive.

Finally, we'll format a USB drive with Windows.

First, insert the USB drive to be formatted into your desktop or laptop machine.

Open the Windows file manager and right-click the drive in the left sidebar.

Select Format from the menu and, in the resulting pop-up, leave everything as the default, give the Volume Label a name, and click Start. When the formatting completes, safely eject the drive and close the file manager.

Formatting a USB drive in Windows should be immediately familiar.

And that, my friends, is how you format a USB flash drive with the three major operating systems.