Format a USB Stick to EXTx using a Mac or WRT-based router

Posted on December 23, 2018  •  1 minutes  • 114 words

Horses for courses. Formats for file systems.

For many reasons including if you use a WRT-based Router, there may come a time where you need to format a USB Stick to EXT2/3/4.

You can do this with mkfs.ext2 / mkfs.ext3 / mkfs.ext4

SSH to your Router and simply run mkfs.ext2

1$ mkfs.ext2

Alternatively you can do it using your Mac using e2fsprogs

• you can install e2fsprogs using brew

1$ brew install e2fsprogs

• Find the name of your target partition or disk

1$ diskutil list

• Run something like the following

1$ sudo $(brew --prefix e2fsprogs)/sbin/mkfs.ext2 /dev/disk2s1

Tip 🚀

You may need to change the drive from disk2s1 to whatever your target disk / partition is.