Disks and partitions need to be formatted before being mounted and used. Linux by default supports several filesystems, which would come with their pros and cons. Some of the popular supported filesystem types are ext4, Btrfs, and exFAT.
Many graphical tools are available to format disks and partitions in Linux. The one installed by default in most Linux distributions is mkfs, a command-line tool and probably the backend to most of the graphical tools.
$ lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT loop0 7:0 0 55.4M 1 loop /snap/core18/19 loop1 7:1 0 55.4M 1 loop /snap/core18/19 loop2 7:2 0 51M 1 loop /snap/snap-stor loop3 7:3 0 219M 1 loop /snap/gnome-3-3 loop4 7:4 0 217.9M 1 loop /snap/gnome-3-3 loop5 7:5 0 31.1M 1 loop /snap/snapd/104 loop6 7:6 0 62.1M 1 loop /snap/gtk-commo loop7 7:7 0 64.8M 1 loop /snap/gtk-commo loop8 7:8 0 51M 1 loop /snap/snap-stor loop9 7:9 0 31.1M 1 loop /snap/snapd/107 sda 8:0 0 20G 0 disk ├─sda1 8:1 0 1M 0 part ├─sda2 8:2 0 513M 0 part /boot/efi └─sda3 8:3 0 19.5G 0 part / sdb 8:16 0 20G 0 disk └─sdb1 8:17 0 20G 0 part sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
$ sudo umount /dev/sdb1 [sudo] password for user: umount: /dev/sdb1: not mounted.
$ sudo mkfs. mkfs.bfs mkfs.ext4 mkfs.ntfs mkfs.cramfs mkfs.fat mkfs.vfat mkfs.ext2 mkfs.minix mkfs.ext3 mkfs.msdos
Type mkfs. and press <TAB> twice for the terminal to show possible autompleted commands.
Install necessary package if your desired filestem is not listed or supported.
$ sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1 mke2fs 1.45.6 (20-Mar-2020) Creating filesystem with 5242624 4k blocks and 1310720 inodes Filesystem UUID: ccab0f8d-3b5b-4189-9da3-23c49159c318 Superblock backups stored on blocks: 32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 4096000 Allocating group tables: done Writing inode tables: done Creating journal (32768 blocks): done Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done
$ blkid /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb1: UUID="ccab0f8d-3b5b-4189-9da3-23c49159c318" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="c088a647-01"
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