Partitioning and formatting an external USB drive to FAT32 filesystem will make it usable in many devices or OS (Linux, Mac, Windows and Android).

The OS I chose is Debian, but it will work in any Debian derived OS, including Ubuntu, Raspbian OS, Linux Mint and so on.

Any of the commands below will run in command line (CLI) and they work with desktop and server environments.

1. Install the dependencies

The dosfstools package contains the mkfs.fat and fsck.fat utilities, where the first one creates the MS-DOS FAT32 filesystem, while the second one checks and repairs the MS-DOS FAT32 filesystem.

If this package is not installed, you can install it by running:

apt update
apt install dosfstools

2. Find out which drive is the USB drive

fdisk -l

In my case, the device is /dev/sdb. Make sure it's the right device, or you can lose the data on it!

3. Delete and partition the drive

This step is required only if you want a different partition type or if the drive doesn't have a partition on it.

fdisk /dev/sdb

a. type d (delete) as many partitions there are
b. type n (new) and choose primary, then hit enter twice
c. type w (write)
d. type q (quit)

4. Create a FAT32 filesystem

mkfs.vfat /dev/sdb1
sync
eject /dev/sdb1

5. Check the newly created filesystem (optional)

Note: The partition must be unmounted before running the check command.

sudo fsck.fat /dev/sdb1

Resources:

• dosfstools Debian homepage
• dosfstools GitHub source code
• mkfs.fat manual
• fsck.fat manual