Formatting USB pen drive in Linux using Terminal
Insert your USB pen drive. Let it get detected and mounted. Open Terminal. Type The Following commands
1. dmesg |tail –> here the ‘|’ key is the pipe, ie, the key before the backspace key(the upper one, so press shift)
You’ll get something like
sathya@shaman:~$ dmesg |tail
[ 9921.681164] sda: Write Protect is off
[ 9921.681174] sda: Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00
[ 9921.681178] sda: assuming drive cache: write through
[ 9921.709138] SCSI device sda: 4030464 512-byte hdwr sectors (2064 MB)
[ 9921.720951] sda: Write Protect is off
[ 9921.720963] sda: Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00
[ 9921.720967] sda: assuming drive cache: write through
[ 9921.721225] sda:
[ 9921.727896] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sda
[ 9921.744187] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
Note the terms in bold. In your system it will be different, maybe sdb or something. Whatever it may be, make sure to substitute it in the commands below, else your hard disk may get formatted.
2. Unmount your pen drive by using
sudo umount /dev/sda (In your case, please substitute sda with the appropriate device, listed above.
3. use the mkfs.vfat command to format to FAT32 filesystem, or mkfs.ext3 to format to ext3 filesystem
sudo mkfs.vfat -n ‘Label’ -I /dev/sda Replace Label with the name you want the pen drive to have.
4. That’s it! When done formatting, you’ll be returned to the prompt
sathya@shaman:~$ mkfs.vfat -n ’sathya’ -I /dev/sda
mkfs.vfat 2.11 (12 Mar 2005)
sathya@shaman:~$
Remove and insert the pen drive to have mounted again!
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Comments
Please how do i solve the problem below?
how do i insert sbaah in sudoers file and where can i find the file
iam a linux newbie
[sbaah@Maint-Engineers ~]$ sudo umount /dev/sdb
Password:
Sorry, try again.
Password:
Sorry, try again.
Password:
sbaah is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
[sbaah@Maint-Engineers ~]$ sudo umount /dev/sdb1
sbaah is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
[...] Posted in formatting, operating systems, linux, commands at 9:56 pm by ~sathya~ This article has been shifted to my new site [...]
This was very helpful. I have a few difficulties — I interpreted the -I option as -l — but I found my errors and make it happen. Thanks.
gr8 blog post Hey..can u explain in detail what the process behind this “mkfs.vfat” or “mkdosfs” is.what does it exactly do?i don quite get how the formatting is happening 
@Above, Explaining how they work is pretty technical stuff, I dont know how it works.
You can have a look at the man pages:
Hmm, Interesting, Never quite tried to do that in linux, I always used to do that in Windoze.