how to format usb drive for ubuntu install

#How to format usb drive for ubuntu install install
#How to format usb drive for ubuntu install full

The label is how the USB flash drive will later appear in the Nautilus file manager.īecause we do this work through the virtual device node /dev/mapper/myusb the whole EXT4 filesystem will be encrypted! sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/myusb -L myusb Using the -L option we can freely choose a label although it cannot be longer than 16 characters. So let's put a EXT4 filesystem on the device. This is the device that eventually will be mounted into the file hierarchy, but before we can mount it we need a filesystem on the device. The virtual device is made available under the device node /dev/mapper/myusb. The virtual device is created using a feature built into the Linux Kernel called the Device Mapper. Now create a virtual device using cryptsetup that encrypts and decrypts all data going to and from the physical device. The passphrase should be at least 3 random words. The key is randomly generated but is itself encrypted using a passphrase that you provide. LUKS stores some metadata at the beginning of the partition regarding the type of encryption used and the encryption key. Using the cryptsetup command we will format the drive with Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS). If we run lsblk again we can now see the new partition is on the device node /dev/sdb1. dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null bs=1M count=100 100+0 records in 100+0 records out 104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 15.1391 s, 6.9 MB/sĦ.9 MB/s is OK for a small 500 MB drive but if the capacity of your drive is in the gigabytes then you probably want this alternative method which is fast and even has a progress indicator, but is not as random: sudo badblocks -c 10240 -s -w -t random -v /dev/sdb Partition the driveĬreate a new primary partition: sudo fdisk /dev/sdb Command (m for help): n Partition type: p primary (0 primary, 0 extended, 4 free) e extended Select (default p): p Partition number (1-4, default 1): 1 First sector (2048-1023999, default 2048): Command (m for help): w Here we measure the performance over 100 MB of random data. To get an idea how long it would take to fill the whole disk we can measure the performance of urandom on a small block of data and compare that with the size of the USB flash drive. Ideally we would put random data on the USB flash drive using this command: sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdb bs=4Kīut /dev/urandom is rather slow in generating random data and there is no progress indicator. The argument to umount is the USB folder name under /media as listed in the output of the lsblk command.

An attacker will have less information to work with when he can't distinguish the part of the disk that is empty from the part that has actual files.įirst unmount the USB from the file hierarchy. Now we are going to put random data on the entire USB disk to increase encryption strength. The next step wipes all data on the USB flash drive. You can copy the files from the /media folder to your harddisk. This is your last chance to backup any existing files on the USB flash drive.

#How to format usb drive for ubuntu install full

The full device node name is therefore /dev/sdb. From the output above we find the USB flash drive device node to be sdb. USB flash drives usually come formatted with a FAT filesystem from the factory and Ubuntu will mount it somewhere under the /media folder. Insert the USB flash drive and run the command lsblk: sudo lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT sda 8:0 0 238.5G 0 disk -sda1 8:1 0 350M 0 part -sda2 8:2 0 3G 0 part -sda3 8:3 0 220.1G 0 part / -sda4 8:4 0 1K 0 part -sda5 8:5 0 15.1G 0 part sdb 8:16 1 500M 0 disk /media/1173-7DA0 It's important we find the correct one as the changes we will be doing are destructive to the content of the drive. Disk devices have device nodes such as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb.

However to encrypt and format a USB flash drive we need to work directly with the raw device.

#How to format usb drive for ubuntu install install

This is the only extra package we need: sudo apt-get install cryptsetup Find the USB device nodeĪpplications usually work with disks through the Virtual File System that abstracts away the actual filesystem (of which Linux has plenty ext3, ext4, xfs etc.) and the physical media. The only noticeable difference is that you will be prompted for a passphrase. In the Nautilus file manager the drive mounts automatically and looks and works the same as any other drive.

Using an encrypted USB flash drive is more or less transparent on Ubuntu.