USB Drives

[Bruce Marshall]

On Saturday, January 22, 2011, GeraldCC wrote:
> Hi Guys,
> I had a usb drive (160GB) connected to a machine running KUbuntu 10.10!!
> It was formatted as NTFS. I copied the data from it then went to format it
> to ext4.
> This I could not do because it was mounted!!!! So I unmounted it and tried
> again, but this time the drive did not exist so I could not format it.
> Could you please explain in simple language so a 74 YO can understand how
> to format a usn device?
> Gerald

The device should be given a /dev/xxx  name when it is plugged into the USB 
port.

Such as  /dev/sdg1

do a   tail /var/log/message

right after plugging in to find out what the /dev/ is.

Then  mkfs.ext4   /dev/sdg1     (or whatever)