Linux Hard Disk Format Command

by nixCraft on March 10, 2008 · 57 comments· last updated at March 10, 2008

Q. I've installed a new 250GB SATA hard disk on our office CentOS Linux server. How do I format a hard disk under Linux operating system from a shell prompt?

A.. There are total 4 steps involved for hard disk upgrade and installation procedure:

Step #1 : Partition the new disk using fdisk command

Following command will list all detected hard disks:
# fdisk -l | grep '^Disk'
Output:

Disk /dev/sda: 251.0 GB, 251000193024 bytes
Disk /dev/sdb: 251.0 GB, 251000193024 bytes

A device name refers to the entire hard disk. For more information see Linux partition naming convention and IDE drive mappings.
To partition the disk - /dev/sdb, enter:
# fdisk /dev/sdb
The basic fdisk commands you need are:

m - print help
p - print the partition table
n - create a new partition
d - delete a partition
q - quit without saving changes
w - write the new partition table and exit

Step#2 : Format the new disk using mkfs.ext3 command

To format Linux partitions using ext2fs on the new disk:
# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1

Step#3 : Mount the new disk using mount command

First create a mount point /disk1 and use mount command to mount /dev/sdb1, enter:
# mkdir /disk1 # mount /dev/sdb1 /disk1 # df -H

Step#4 : Update /etc/fstab file

Open /etc/fstab file, enter:
# vi /etc/fstab
Append as follows:

/dev/sdb1               /disk1           ext3    defaults        1 2

Save and close the file.

Task: Label the partition

You can label the partition using e2label. For example, if you want to label the new partition /backup, enter
# e2label /dev/sdb1 /backup
You can use label name insted of partition name to mount disk using /etc/fstab:
LABEL=/backup /disk1 ext3 defaults 1 2

You should follow me on twitter here or grab rss feed to keep track of new changes.

Featured Articles:

{ 57 comments… read them below or add one }

1 aniket March 11, 2008 at 1:53 pm

yah thats good for understand………

2 aniket March 11, 2008 at 1:55 pm

i have 48TB storage server in raid 5, how do i format this server?

3 punam sen December 3, 2010 at 6:27 pm

to format the corresponding hdd you need a RAM(Random Access Memory) 1 YB(yota byte)
1YB=1024 ZB
1ZB=1024 XB
1XB=1024 PB
1PB=1024 TB

4 HAHA May 3, 2013 at 7:42 pm: That’s retarded.
Reply

5 vivek March 11, 2008 at 2:20 pm

Aniket,

Use LVM directly or read this tutorial which explains how to create partition larger than 2TB

6 ankur March 27, 2008 at 5:36 am

How do I format a harddisk using linux system call

7 lakshmikanthan July 9, 2008 at 1:54 pm

hi,

thank you fro valuable information

8 dragon August 1, 2008 at 7:52 am

how to format a disk by cpp programe?is there any sample code ?

9 Nagarajan January 6, 2009 at 3:11 pm

Hi,

Thank you very much this valuable information.

Regards,
Nagarajan.S.G

10 Iyyappan January 29, 2009 at 8:16 am

/dev/sdb1 /disk1 ext3 defaults 1 2

The above line what is mean by defaults and what is 1 2 ?

can u explain those two things !

11 bjaanes November 4, 2011 at 9:48 pm

This is directly from the arch linux (amazing) documentation:

The first number is “dump”: used by the dump utility to decide when to make a backup. Dump checks the entry and uses the number to decide if a file system should be backed up. Possible entries are 0 and 1. If 0, dump will ignore the file system; if 1, dump will make a backup. Most users will not have dump installed, so they should put 0 for the entry.
The second number is “pass”: used by fsck to decide which order filesystems are to be checked. Possible entries are 0, 1 and 2. The root file system should have the highest priority 1 – all other file systems you want to have checked should have a 2. File systems with a value 0 will not be checked by the fsck utility.

12 Pgt August 22, 2012 at 12:55 am: Thanks bjaanes
Reply

13 shyam kumar February 24, 2009 at 5:50 am

IN my system both WINDOWS-XP and LINUX , I’ve installed. after that
I want to format the linux OS from my system.
so please send to me tricks or method on Email addr., so i can remove LUNUX OS from my system.
BY both method (i)Text command and
(ii)without Text command.

14 Greatkanth March 22, 2011 at 10:07 am: Hey man I also have same problem .did u got any methods to remove . please help man
Reply

15 HyPerCuBe March 12, 2009 at 3:56 pm

verrrrrrrrry useful i’ve searched for 2 days for this thanks

16 Sathish April 16, 2009 at 10:47 am

Hi,

Thank you very much this valuable information. Very useful this

Thanks
B. Sathish.

17 Prasoon May 11, 2009 at 6:18 pm

I have installed CentOS ..
now i want my disk to be fully formatted like a new one. with no files on it..

i remember doing it by booting in DOS mode in Win98..
Please tell how can i do it..

18 mjisri May 20, 2009 at 4:06 am

Thank you.
nice and clear.

19 LinuxUser July 14, 2009 at 8:10 am

Excellent and easy. Thanx

20 Charanjit Singh Cheema July 18, 2009 at 7:20 am

Nice information and esp. the link that you posted for Anikat. Information really useful pal. Thanks a ton..

Regards
Charanjit Singh Cheema

21 Carlo August 16, 2009 at 11:14 am

Thank you, this is the kind of fast reference that one is always looking for

22 antonio August 21, 2009 at 10:23 pm

Well, this saved me an hour of banging my head against the wall… well written! thanks!

23 Jam September 1, 2009 at 10:00 am

Yes. Very useful. Thanks.

24 anburaja September 9, 2009 at 12:11 pm

help me to see the out put of the php programe, i have php 2007 developer

25 anburaja September 9, 2009 at 12:13 pm

god bless you

26 Lion September 21, 2009 at 7:42 pm

Very simple and useful, thanks :)

27 Chris November 6, 2009 at 2:08 am

Great. Searched for a long time to find this, very well done. Thanks!

28 Sanjay January 15, 2010 at 10:59 am

Can any one tell me what the mean by 1,2 in default and when i create a raid partition is there any change in default charcter or it is sama as ” default” .

29 manikandan April 14, 2010 at 6:50 am

IN my Laptop both WINDOWS-XP and LINUX, i’ve safe the problem in windows hal.dll file is corrupted.
so please send to me tricks or method on Email addr.

30 Rick May 1, 2010 at 1:48 pm

Good Recipe for what I did in UNIX for years with the simple format command.
You boiled it down to an excellent example…

31 Sigie May 1, 2010 at 2:14 pm

very helpfull , thanks.

32 aaron May 14, 2010 at 5:29 pm

very first command (fdisk /dev/sdb) failed. message is “Unable to open /dev/sdb”. any suggestions?

33 Abdelmannan May 23, 2010 at 12:07 pm

Hello all,

Is there any software to bound two NIC to use on ip address for both NICs.

Thanks

34 Vivek Gite May 23, 2010 at 1:46 pm: See our tutorial for more info.
Reply

35 Pankaj, Lucknow June 7, 2010 at 11:26 am

Thank you very much these are very good and easy way commands to understand for the people.

36 mumunendra kumar July 26, 2010 at 4:42 pm

how to format linex form my system plz reply solution at my email

37 vahid August 26, 2010 at 3:02 am

thanks alot ,,,,, that was really usefull

38 sandeep choudhary August 27, 2010 at 1:52 pm

how many formatting for window and linux
plz sand ams on my email address

39 raj September 30, 2010 at 6:46 pm

I deleted the panel in ubuntu by mistake.. how can i get the default panels?

40 sathishkumar October 14, 2010 at 2:53 pm

The above steps are so good and easy to format

Thank u Very much for your Formating steps.

41 linux December 18, 2010 at 4:12 pm

a very nice article. thank you for sharing.

42 kunal December 30, 2010 at 10:10 am

how do installed linux …. with command ???? tell me all command…????

43 bapi January 30, 2011 at 5:04 am

44 Guy February 6, 2011 at 1:04 am

Good article.
Note: this works on centos 5.5 … fyi.

45 Narendra June 10, 2011 at 4:28 am

46 Aravind September 12, 2011 at 8:39 am: Hi Naren…I need to format my linux suse10.3 from my system.Will you please help me how to do.i am very new to this linux.If u have any tricks means please send me that files also.Aravind
Thank you
Reply

47 paco July 31, 2011 at 3:42 pm

Good tuto, thank you

48 retheesh October 4, 2011 at 3:31 pm

very good solution thanks…

49 Ashok December 13, 2011 at 2:39 am

Very Good solution.

Thanks

50 Zero February 11, 2012 at 12:58 pm

just wanted to let you know you just saved my life, cheers mate

51 BINU RAJAN March 22, 2012 at 5:49 pm

Vivek Gite U R GREAT
MY HDD WAS DETCTED BUT WAS NOT BOOTING AND WAS ALSO DENYING FRESH INSTALLATION OF WINDOWS AND WAS RETURNING SOME STOP ERROR …. BUT AFTER FORMATING ONE OF MY PARTITION IN SLAX NOW EVERYTHING IS BACK TO NORMAL AND IT ALSO SAVED MY TONNES OF DATA

52 brandon April 20, 2012 at 7:11 pm

I am using VMWare version 8 to run backtrack 5 and I added another hard drive to it. How do I format the drive to place a rainbow table on the said drive?

53 Sia Gi May 15, 2012 at 8:48 pm: Very good and concise tutorial, thank you.
Reply

54 Vicky July 2, 2012 at 12:50 pm

HI,

I have a FS created with the below cmd and started using fine.

mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1
(/dev/sdb1 been allocated from SAN with 1 TB capacity)

Now, I have resized the disk /dev/sdb1 to 2 TB from the SAN. After this my filesystem doesn’t show the resized capacity of 2 TB :(, it still shows as 1 TB. What has to be done to get the FS space resized without data loss ?

Please help with this.

Thank you.
Cheers,
Vicky

55 Vimal July 30, 2012 at 6:24 pm

Very clear & complete. Keep it up..!

56 Ahphu August 18, 2012 at 4:57 am

hi
I have 640GB. how to format this hard disk for Linux operating system?
Please help me solution…..

57 Tejas Sakhare April 29, 2013 at 5:50 am

I have 1.60GB. how to format this hard disk of Linux OS System. I have try but disk not detected for formatting. I want to OS Windows
Please help me solution…..