Celeb Glow
news | March 27, 2026

Format external hard drive to ext4 in command line [duplicate]

How do you format an external hard drive to ext4 via the command line in ubuntu?

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1 Answer

The command is mkfs.ext4, see its man page.

If you are ok with the default settings(1), it's just

mkfs.ext4 /dev/yourpartitionhere

Footnotes:

(1) from the man page:

The defaults of the parameters for the newly created filesystem, if not overridden by the options listed below, are controlled by the /etc/mke2fs.conf configuration file. See the mke2fs.conf(5) manual page for more details.

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