🧽 How to Format a USB Drive in NixOS (The Simple Way)

💡 This guide is for beginners using NixOS who just want to clean or reformat a USB stick.

So you’re using NixOS and you want to format a USB drive — maybe to reuse it, erase everything on it, or make it readable on Windows or macOS. But since NixOS does things differently, it can feel confusing. Don’t worry — formatting a USB is still pretty easy.

Let’s walk through it step by step.

🔍 Step 1: Find Your USB Drive

Plug in your USB stick and open a terminal. Then run:

lsblk

You’ll see a list of drives. Look for your USB drive by its size. It might look like this:

NAME   SIZE TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda    512G disk 
├─sda1 512G part /
sdb     16G disk 
└─sdb1  16G part /run/media/you/USB

In this case, sdb is the USB. Be very careful here — don’t pick your main drive (like sda) or you’ll wipe everything!

📦 Step 2: Unmount the USB (If Needed)

Before you can format the drive, you need to unmount it. Run:

sudo umount /dev/sdX1

Replace sdX1 with your actual USB partition (e.g., sdb1).

🧰 Step 3: Install…