Formating your USB memory pen / stick via command line is pretty easy. Once you know how to do it, that is.

Just follow these steps to quickly format your USB media in Linux:

Gnome Format is a tool to easily format (erase and initialize) external memory media like USB sticks or SD/MMC flash cards for your PC. It is designed for Linux based operating systems using the GNOME desktop.

gparted is really good to format hard disks and make partitions and so on, but if I have a *non-formatted* usb stick and plug it into my system, the system usually does nothing at all! And thats the field for gnome-format! It's easy to use, simple and small. For bigger tasks such as making partitions there is gparted!

You can download the source from here, or if you have Ubuntu, the gnome-format package is already in the universe repository (Jaunty), so all you have to do is:

sudo apt-get install gnome-format

I thought that maybe some of you don't know that external USB devices, like memory sticks and probably memory card with card readers can also be formated via NTFS.

Here is a little tutorial on how to do that.
Enjoy!

With the memory stick connected via USB do this:

1. Right click on My computer icon from desktop or from start menu

2. Select "Manage"

3. Select "Disk Management" sub-menu under "Storage"

4. Right click on the memory stick letter (mine was "H" drive)

5. Click on "Properties"

6. Go to "Hardware" tab and select the memory stick in that list

7. Click on "Properties" in the same window

8. Go to "Policies" tab

9. Select "Optimize for performance"

10. Click OK on that window and the window underneath. then close the other windows.

Now you can go to "My Computer", right click on the memory stick icon and when you select "format..." , you should be able to also select, FAT32 and also NTFS.


This tutorial may also apply to the memory cards connected via card reader to the USB. I didn't try it, so , if you did, you're welcome to comment and tell us.
Good Luck!:)