Idiot-proof Method To Format A Flash Drive

Home » CentOS » Idiot-proof Method To Format A Flash Drive
CentOS 4 Comments

Whenever I format a flash drive I’m always terrified that I’m going to fat-finger something in the terminal and accidentally blow away a partition on one of my hard drives. *shudder*

Is gparted the best gui to handle this task? Or is there something better? I’d really prefer something more limited that just allows me to select whatever it sees as a removable drive and disallows any screwin’ about with the other drives.

“Format the USB connected drive?”.
“Choose format (ext4, ext3, fat32)”.
“Blammo.”

4 thoughts on - Idiot-proof Method To Format A Flash Drive

  • nearly all disks are removable… AHCI sata drives can be hotplugged, etc.

    I’ve not used gparted, just command line parted, I’m pretty sure it won’t let you mangle a disk thats got mounted partitions

  • Nux gave the program names already…… but…..

    In CentOS 7 under the default GNOME desktop, Applications->Utilities->Disks

    I forget where palimpsest gets put on CentOS 6, sorry.

    This is actually a pretty good tool for most purposes. It doesn’t allow some relatively arcane operations, but basic formatting it does very well (it’s especially weak on LVM operations, at least that’s what I’ve experienced thus far, but I always reserve the right to be wrong). It also allows creating disk images and restoring from disk images, as well as some diagnostics, and powering down or ejecting media, as appropriate.

  • gnome-disks it is!

    While digging around for information about this I discovered that Linux Mint apparently has a nifty little program called mintstick that appears to be designed specifically for the purpose of formatting USB drives. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like it’s available for either CentOS or Fedora at the moment.

    Oh well. gnome-disks will do what I want it to do.

    Thanks!