Format USB Pen Drive With Gparted Linux GUI

I've had a pen drive for a couple years that I use regularly. It always comes in handy, and gets used often. Last night I decided it was time to remove all the data and wipe the drive. I started fumbling around in the command line looking for my USB pen drive and realized that there had to be an easier way to accomplish this task. Then I thought about Gparted. Gparted is a great program to use when you have to re-partition your hard drive or any partitioned device. It's a GUI and works great.

I did a yum search gparted, and found the program in the repositories. I installed the program using yum install gparted. Yum did all the work and gparted was installed. I opened my system folder, found the link for gparted, and opened up the program.

Before you open Gparted you have to plug in your USB pen drive. Once you open Gparted it will ask for your password, and then it will search for any partitions on the system. In the upper right hand corner of the program you want to click on the /dev/sda drop down menu and find your USB pen drive. On my system it was found on /dev/sdb select it by clicking on it. In the main part of the program you will see the partitions listed for your USB pen drive. On mine I had a 3.81 Gib partition, and a 14.23 Mib partition. I'm pretty sure you want to leave the smaller partition alone as this loads the device or makes it recognizable in any system you plug it into. I clicked on the larger 3.81 Gib partition listed as /dev/sdb1 on my system and then clicked on Partition , Format to, Fat 32. And Gparted formated the drive quickly.

If you want the drive to be interchangeable with windows machines I strongly suggest the fat32 format option. That's it, all done, I now have a wiped USB pen drive, all the old data is gone, and I now have a clean USB stick to use again hopefully for many more years to come.

I always use Gparted for any partition work I do on my drive. The program is a really easy to use GUI and once loaded it's almost self explanatory. I'm going to be making some changes to my system soon, and will be using this program for some future projects. I'll be posting more on this fantastic tool in future posts.