

Important note if your USB drive contains data that you do not want to lose: Make sure to backup the data on your USB drive first, before continuing. Any type of Linux PC with whichever desktop environment you prefer.To complete the steps in this tutorial, you just need: In case you prefer to work from the terminal instead, refer to the article about how to format and mount a USB drive in the Linux terminal. Note that it works on all sorts of drives, including: HDD, SSD, USB and SD-card. GParted is a graphical user interface program for creating and formatting partitions on drives. GParted stands for Gnome Partition editor. This article shows you how to format your USB drive to EXT4, with the help of GParted. Okay great, but how do you change the file system on your USB drive to EXT4? Additionally, you do not have to worry about data fragmentation. Besides that you have more control over file ownership. With the EXT4 file system, you preserve file permissions when storing data on it. In case you solely run Linux on your PCs, the EXT4 file system serves you far better. From a manufacturer’s perspective this makes sense: Linux, Windows and macOS can work with these file systems, making the USB drive plug-and-play. Newly purchased USB drives typically come formatted as FAT32 or NTFS file systems. I personally use them for quickly copying files from one PC to the other and for backup purposes.

USB drives are wonderfully versatile and low-cost devices that probably every PC user makes use of. GParted is a graphical user interface program, available on pretty much all popular Linux distributions. In this article you learn how to format your USB drive with the help of GParted. As whip-cream on top, you can stop worrying about data fragmentation as well. Although Linux can handle this, the EXT4 file system offers advantage: EXT4 gives you far better control over file permissions and ownership. To access removable media, go to the top-right corner of the application and choose the removable media.USB drives typically come preformatted as FAT32 or NTFS file systems. By default it goes to the hard drive of your computer. When it’s recognized the drives, you’ll see a screen as below. It takes some time to search for all the disks present on the system. To do that, go to the Unity dash and search for GParted. You can install it using the terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T): sudo apt-get install gparted Step 2: It’s a free and open source partition manager for Linux. And thus I came up with this tutorial to help others learn how to format a SD card or USB key in Ubuntu. I had to go around and format the removable disk with the help of GParted. The above mentioned error is a known bug which has been unresolved for months – despite this, Disks is still being served as the default disk utility program (why?).
