Used to display and manage disk/volume information
From the Ubuntu desktop, In System-Administration or dash-home : Disk-utility or Disks
WARNING ! Do not select Format Drive unless you want to format the entire disk drive
If you are working with a volume in a file, see losetup for making loop devices available. These will only be shown by disk utility version 2.30 and higher, otherwise you will have to unlock them manually first with cryptsetup
Select the Drive, select the partition if any and then select Format Volume. Choose your-label-name that you want to use in the future
If cryptsetup is installed then a new volume can be formatted with LUKS encryption based on a passphrase. Note that the empty space in the new volume is not automatically filled with random data, you can do this yourself
Close the utility and open your file manager. You may have to click on the drive to mount it
For removable drives : Make sure that you leave it closed/locked and unmounted, otherwise you may get a data error
The utility gives you the option to change the passphrase. Note that if you think someone had access to your passphrase then it is better to create a new volume
For advanced partitioning rather use gparted first and then encrypt the volume with the utility