Tutorial: Formatting and Partitioning a USB drive in Ubuntu

Hey everyone!

Since it came in as a support ticket - and people in our LMS class asked about us doing videos of our own, here’s our first attempt.

Partitioning and formatting an external USB drive for use with Ubuntu.

The application used for it is GParted.

sudo apt install gparted
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Hi Vasileios,
I was checking out your video, in the tutorials section, on BitChute, “Partition and Format USB Drive for Ubuntu” and I’m getting a message that it is blocked for “Other Platform Misuse”. Seems pretty odd to me since it is just a tutorial.
I wanted to give you a heads up. Wasn’t sure if you knew that this was happening.
By the way, I’ve been with you guys from the beginning and I’m taking classes. Thanks for all that you do.

Nikki

Hello Nikki!
Yes, it would appear that BitChute took only a couple of days after the upload of the special broadcast Jeff and I had to censor us.

I replaced the video with a new upload via Odysee. You can see it now. :blush:

Thank you for your support - and as always, it’s my pleasure to help!

Hi Vasileios :slight_smile:

Is it the place to ask a question on the tutorial/course episode 8 about formatting and partioning using gparted? I can’t make change on my drives like you do. All my drives seem to be sda compare to you sdb is it my problem and why i dont have sdb like you. I have a fresh instal of unbuntu 20.4.3 LTS on an old gateway FX6840.

I further my research about hard drive in linux and understand now that if I have only sda its because physically I have only one hard drive if you have a sdb means you have two and so on … sorry for that question i should have research my own. I understand also that the number following sda are the partition. I looked also at what kind of partition table my hard drive is using, MBR or GPT, using the sudo fdisk -l command . I know now my only one hard drive is a MBR system. There is limitation regarding MBR number of partition (4) but I am below that with two partition (one is extended if im not wrong) I dont see why it would not permit me to make changes like you do in the tutorial but … it doesnt seem to be an authorisation problem neither… I continu my research thanks
and here is a picture of the situation !

Follow-up : I unmounted the partition i could with a right click, like sda1 and sda5, and now it look I can do some modification on them (like formatting or resize) but its not them I want to partition. I want to partition in 2 or 3 the big 1.36T left over on sda6! That one seems to have been allocate to unbutu and I remember choosing the lvm encryption option during my ubuntu install. Is it because sda6 is encrypted that it doesnt work? I have the option to deactivate the sda6 drive I gave it a try without success I get a message saying it cannot deactivate it because its contain file system in use.

Follow-up: ok I read that its impossible to operate your own brain ! Meaning in my case wanting to partition the drive where ubuntu is running is impossible unless I run ubuntu from a flash drive and then modify the computer hard drive…seems logic I’ll give it a try and report . Vasileios I’m still not sure its appropriate for me to write all this here so if it’s not feel free to erase all of it, Iwon’t take it personal ! :wink:

Follow-up: running from a usb flash drive i just made, I still cannot resize my partition like the tutorial BUT I have one more option available now its the option ‘create partition table’ under the ‘Device tab’ in the gparted menu. The warning message about erase it all afraid me but it seem a way to repartition the drive and I have the image in the usb stick and nothing in the computer I could test it but I prefer waiting for a tip for now. thanks

Last thing but not least I realize I do not try exactly to do the same thing you do in the tutorial but instead trying your technique to ‘‘repartition’’ my main hard drive vs you seem to do it for another hard drive. would that explain my fail ? the idea I had was splitting my main hard drive with many ex partition to install many flavor of linux for fun and learning on that same computer.

Hey @pete!
It would appear that your initial installation has already more than enough space for your home folder. And you are correct, the physical drives come with different letters of the alphabet, meaning Drive 1 = sda, Drive 2 = sdb, etc.

The definitions of sda1, sda2, etc. means different partitions on the same physical drive.

The tutorial I posted was for smaller drives, which occurred to some of the people - hence I made it in the first place. :slight_smile:

What I included in the tutorial was a completely blank, additional drive. That one I formatted for use only as a home folder. Since your system has enough capacity, there’s no reason to make your life difficult. :wink:

:+1: Thanks Vasileios

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My pleasure, @pete! :slight_smile:

I am trying to create a usb with persistent memory. My understanding is that I need to create a usb with two partitions - one for the Linux installation and one for the data. I have found some guidance and have tried to do it with both GParted and Gnome disk utility but I run into the same issue. The USB has some memory as ‘unallocated’ (about 1 MiB) and the rest is a partition. When I tried to make a new partition for the linux os say 5-8 GB, it does not let me create a primary partition because there is already one. I’ve formatted the usb to see if I could get rid of the partition (30GB) but I can’t. Any thoughts?
Thanks,