#3: Formatting A USB Stick

Not too long ago, I found this program which makes formatting things in Ubuntu much easier. The program is called gparted, and can be found in the Synaptic Package Manager (System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager).

WARNING: Make sure any important information on the USB drive is taken off before formatting, you will lose all information on the USB drive.

Once gparted is installed, open up the Terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal), and type in the command "sudo gparted". Sudo is a command which gives you root priveleges, which can spell bad news if you mess with important files, which is why you should know exactly what you are doing before using it (or using information from a trusted source).

This should bring you to the main page of gparted, which looks like this (click for bigger picture):



From here you will want to find the exact thing you want to format, in this case we want to format a USB stick. Look under the Size column, to find a partition that is ~ the size of what you want to format (a USB stick would typically be much smaller than your hard drives). If your USB stick is not listed there, try to look through all the menu choices under GParted -> Devices.

Before you can format your USB stick, you will have to unmount it. Right click the USB stick, and press "Unmount." Now, pay close attention to the Filesystem column, usually USB sticks are FAT16 or FAT32. You will most likely want to format it in the same format, unless you know what you are doing.

Next, right click the USB stick -> Format To -> choose the same format as the stick was before. Now you click the apply button at the top of the window, a progress bar will move fairly quickly, and your USB stick should be as good as new.