Formating USB drive

[alanrlow]

I have an external USB drive that I want to format but I can't find a Linux utility to do this. I would also like to quickly and easily format USB zip drives too. The ability to format in FAT, NTFS or EXT? would be good as well. GParted seems like overkill.

[Irithori]

gparted is for partitioning drives.

Partitioning is related, but not actually formating.
You can use fdisk or cfdisk if you want quick partitioning tools.

For the actual formating, you need mkfs
After installing the corresponding useralnd tools (e2fsprogs, ntfsprogs, dosfstools, etc ) for a filesystem, the these are available:
mkfs.ext3, mkfs.ext4, mkfs.vfat, mkfs.ntfs

Look at their manpages for detailed info

[alanrlow]

gparted is for partitioning drives.

Partitioning is related, but not actually formating.
You can use fdisk or cfdisk if you want quick partitioning tools.

For the actual formating, you need mkfs
After installing the corresponding useralnd tools (e2fsprogs, ntfsprogs, dosfstools, etc ) for a filesystem, the these are available:
mkfs.ext3, mkfs.ext4, mkfs.vfat, mkfs.ntfs

Look at their manpages for detailed info

Thanks for the reply. These seem to be command line programs, are there any easier to use GUI type utilities that do the job?

[Irithori]

Probably yes.
Never cared to even look

You might find, that commandline gives you everything you need to do this job.