Managing USB Flash Drives

[musther]

One thing that most people have to do from time to time is deal with USB flash drives, some people have to do it a lot.

Using them is easy in Ubuntu, but not so easy is formatting them or naming the volumes.

An easy way to format drives is gparted, and it's on the live cd, but for some reason it's not included in the install, why is that? It provides a great way to manage all your drives and partitions.

Also, users need a way to easily name the volumes on their drives, for example 'Peters-Drive', or 'Peters-Photos' or 'Peters-MP3'. Maybe this should be included in gparted to keep everything in one nice location.

What are thoughts on this - I think it is quite a problem?

[C-A]

I have wondered the same thing - Why is gparted on the livecd and but then not installed by default? I agree, it should be installed by default. .

[ephesius]

Gparted is included on the live-cd so that you can do custom partitioning for the install. It probably isn't included by default because not many people would actually use it.

[musther]

I think it's very useful, especially when using USB drives and the like. I also found a thread about adding the ability to name volumes to gparted, it seems like they're working on it, so that would make it even more useful to have.

[mrmonday]

I think it would be best not to have gparted installed by default, because less knowledgeable/ new users, could easily make a mistake. I do however think that the renaming of USB Flash Drives, should be as easy as right clicking the drive, and going to rename... I had to go into ******* to to this.

[styven]

You can download gparted on it's own, and use it like a live cd.

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

[EdThaSlayer]

I concur with the topic creator. After Ubuntu 6.10 I heard the handy "Disk" utility was removed, so they should have replaced it with GParted, since GParted is such a useful and stable application.