How to format a hard drive in Linux

When you lease a remote managed or even unmanaged server, you do not typically have to concern yourself with formatting hard drives. Still, it is a good skill to learn, and if you find yourself in a situation where you are building your own web hosting server, it is a very useful skill to have. For desktop Linux, there are plenty of graphical tools for formatting, but on a server, you will have to dig your hands into the soil of the command line. Follow these easy steps:

1. Find the name of your hard drive:

# fdisk -l | grep '^Disk'

It will give you a list of the available disks. Make sure you choose the right one:

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

2. Create at least one disk partition:

# fdisk /dev/sdb

For more information about hard disk partitioning, see this guide.

3. Format the hard drive. For this you actually use the mkfs (make filesystem) command:

# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1

(Ext3 is a filesystem type. You can use others, such as vfat)

Read the rest of the steps, including mounting your new system at nixCraft.