Create and format a hard disk partition

To create a partition or volume (the two terms are often used interchangeably) on a hard disk, you must be logged in as an administrator, and there must be either unallocated disk space or free space within an extended partition on the hard disk.

If there is no unallocated disk space, you can create some by shrinking an existing partition, deleting a partition, or by using a third-party partitioning program.

Open Computer Management by selecting the Start button. The select Control Panel > System and Security > Administrative Tools, and then double-click Computer Management.

In the left pane, under Storage, select Disk Management.

Right-click an unallocated region on your hard disk, and then select New Simple Volume.

In the New Simple Volume Wizard, select Next.

Enter the size of the volume you want to create in megabytes (MB) or accept the maximum default size, and then select Next.

Accept the default drive letter or choose a different drive letter to identify the partition, and then select Next.

In the Format Partition dialog box, do one of the following:

If you don’t want to format the volume right now, select Do not format this volume, and then select Next.

To format the volume with the default settings, select Next.

Review your choices, and then select Finish.

Note: When you create new partitions on a basic disk, the first three will be formatted as primary partitions. Beginning with the fourth, each one will be configured as a logical drive within an extended partition.

How to Format Your USB Drives in Windows 10

If you have a malfunctioning or corrupted USB drive, formatting it may be the best way to get it back to its original working state. Even if your drive is healthy, you may still want to format it as a quick and easy way to erase its contents.

This article looks at some ways you can format a USB drive on Windows. If you know some other ways of achieving the same result, let us know about them in the comments section below.

Which File System Should You Use?

Before you format your USB drive, you need to think about which file system to use. File Systems are simply ways of organizing data on a storage device (such as hard drives or SD Cards). Support for various file systems varies depending on your operating system.

Windows 10 offers three file system options when formatting a USB drive: FAT32, NTFS, and exFAT. Here is the breakdown of the pros and cons of each filesystem.

Pros	Cons	Best Used For
Fat 32	* Compatible with all major operating systems * Less memory usage	* Cannot handle single files larger than 4GB *Limited partition size (up to 32GB)	* Removable storage devices such as USB Flash Drives * Devices that need to be plugged into a variety of operating systems
NTFS	* Can create partitions larger than 32GB * Can read/write files larger than 4GB * Supports on-the-fly file encryption	* Limited cross-platform compatibility	* Internal hard drives * Windows system drives
exFAT	* Provides an unlimited file and partition size	* You may need to install drivers to get exFAT compatibility on Linux	* External hard drives * Flash drives if you want to work with files larger than 4GB

Next, let’s take a look at some ways you can format your USB drive on Windows 10.

Method 1: Format USB Drive from File Explorer

The most popular way to format a storage device, and arguably one of the easiest, is directly through Windows File Explorer. The process is the same for both internal and external storage devices.

To format a USB drive this way:

1. Right-click on it in a File Explorer window and choose “Format … ” from the menu that pops up.

2. Choose the filesystem you’ve decided to use on the device.

3. Choose the allocation unit size you’d like to use. Higher values are better if you’re planning to store large files, giving a small boost to performance and reducing fragmentation. However, they also waste some space. Keep in mind that most devices have an optimal allocation unit size, so we suggest choosing the default value. It’s also worth noting that most storage media today are tuned for the 4096 value.

4. Enter a name for your USB drive in the field under the Volume label.

5. Leave “Quick Format” enabled if you didn’t keep sensitive data that you’d want to erase and if you’re sure your USB drive works properly. A Quick Format marks the device as empty but doesn’t actually erase its contents. It’s the equivalent of flipping a switch from “not empty” to “empty.” A full format takes more time, and in the case of large multi-terabyte external hard disk drives, it can even take days. However, it goes over the full storage area, bit by bit, ensuring there are no bad sectors and everything works correctly.

6. Click on Start to format your USB drive.

Method 2: Format USB Drive from the Device Manager

If, for some reason, Windows didn’t assign a letter to your USB drive, or its filesystem was corrupted, it may not show up in File Explorer. Thankfully, it’s similarly easy to format it from the Disk Management app.

1. Press Win + X to access Windows 10’s administrative quick menu. Choose Disk Management. Alternatively, you can locate and run it from the Start menu by pressing the Win Key and then typing its name.

2. Disk Management will present you with a list of all storage devices and their partitions. If your drive works properly, you will see one or more partitions listed inside it. You can format them individually. Alternatively, if you’d prefer to remove them and use all of the space on your drive as one contiguous block, click on each of them and choose “Remove Volume” until none remain.

3. If your USB drive’s space is presented as unallocated, right-click on it and create a new volume. Windows 10 offers multiple options, but in 99 percent of the cases, you want to go with a Simple Volume.

4. Follow the New Simple Volume Wizard steps to create a partition and then format it.

5. If you want to create more than one partition in your USB drive, you can input a smaller volume size for the one you are currently making. This will leave empty space on your drive, allowing you to repeat the process to create more partitions later.

6. You will have the option to assign a drive letter to the partition you are creating directly from this wizard. You can also map it to an empty NTFS folder instead or skip assigning a drive letter altogether.

7. As when formatting from File Explorer, you’ll be able to choose a file system, the allocation unit size, enter a volume label, and decide if you’ll go for a quick format.

8. Before the actual format, the New Simple Volume Wizard will present a summary of your choices. Click on Finish to accept them and format your USB drive.

9. However, if your drive already contains one or more partitions that you want to format without applying any changes to them, the process is even more straightforward. While in the Disk Management app, right-click on the partition you want to format and choose that option (Format …) from the menu that pops up.

10. Enter a name for the partition in the volume label field. As with the previous approaches, choose a file system, allocation unit size, and whether you want to perform a quick format. Click on OK to format your USB drive.

Method 3: Format USB Drive from the Command Prompt

If you prefer the command line, you can format a USB drive with the diskpart command in Powershell.

This tool is basically the command-line equivalent of the Disk Management application used in the previous section.

1. Press Win + X and choose Windows PowerShell (Admin). There, type diskpart and press Enter.

2. Type the following command to view the active drives on your machine:

3. Use the select command to choose your USB drive by stating its disk number from the previous command. Replace “disk 1” in the following with the one that matches your own USB drive.

4. Remove your USB drive’s contents to start fresh with:

5. Create and activate a partition with the following two commands:

6. To perform a quick format on the partition you just created using the NTFS file system and the label “MTE,” use:

7. Lastly, assign a letter to your drive with:

Format with Modern PowerShell Tools

The modern command-line warrior will probably prefer PowerShell’s specialized commands for the job at hand.

1. Fire up PowerShell with administrative privileges. There, type the following to see a list of your connected storage devices:

2. In our case, Get-Disk reported our USB Flash Drive as the Number 1 drive. Replace that number with the one that matches your own drive in the command that follows to fully erase its contents:

3. Answer positively (by typing “Y” and pressing enter) when asked if you’re sure you want to perform this action.

4. Proceed by creating a new partition, setting it as active, and assigning it a drive letter with:

5. Finally, format your partition with the filesystem and label of your choice using the command Format-Volume. Formatting the one mapped to letter F with the FAT32 filesystem and the label FlashDrive would look like:

The Retro Way

As with many other things in life, when formatting a USB drive, sometimes the old way is also the easiest and the best.

Note that this only works in existing partitions by erasing their contents, which, in the process, allows you to choose a different filesystem and set a volume label. Like with all other methods, you can also go for a full or quick format.

To erase everything in partition F formatted with the FAT32 filesystem, assign it the label FlashDrive and do a quick format. The command would be:

The command will ask you to insert a new disk and press Enter. Ignore the “inserting disk” part, press Enter, and enjoy your newly formatted drive.

As described, there are many ways to format USB drives under Windows 10. If instea, you have an unformattable and unusable USB drive, check out the various ways to fix it.

Related:

OK’s real life started at around 10, when he got his first computer — a Commodore 128. Since then, he’s been melting keycaps by typing 24/7, trying to spread The Word Of Tech to anyone interested enough to listen. Or, rather, read.

How to Format a Hard Drive

You must format a drive before using it in Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista, or XP

To format a hard drive means to erase any information on the drive and to set up a file system so your operating system can read data from, and write data to, the drive. You need to format a hard drive if you plan on using it in Windows.

As complicated as that might sound, this isn’t really difficult to do in any version of Windows. All operating systems offer this capability and Windows makes it easy.

If the hard drive you want to format has never been used or was just wiped clean, it must first be partitioned. See our article How to Partition a Hard Drive in Windows for instructions. Once partitioned, return to this page for help formatting the drive.

Time Required: The time it takes to format a hard drive in Windows depends almost entirely on the drive’s size, but your computer’s overall speed plays a part, too.

How to Format a Hard Drive in Windows

Follow these easy steps to format a hard drive in Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, or Windows XP:

Open Disk Management, the hard drive manager included with all versions of Windows.

Opening Disk Management can be done a number of ways depending on your version of Windows, but the easiest method is to type diskmgmt.msc in the Run dialog box or the Start menu.

Another way to open Disk Management is through Control Panel.

After Disk Management opens, which might take several seconds, look for the drive you want to format from the list at the top. There’s a lot of information in Disk Management, so if you can’t see everything, maximize the window.

Look for the amount of storage on the drive as well as the drive name. For example, if it says Music for the drive name and it has 2 GB of hard drive space, then you’ve likely selected a small flash drive full of music.

Feel free to open the drive to make sure that it’s what you want to format if it makes you confident that you’re going to format the right device.

If you don’t see the drive listed on the top or an Initialize Disk windows appears, it probably means that the hard drive is new and has not yet been partitioned. Partitioning is something that must be done before a hard drive is formatted. See our article How to Partition a Hard Drive for instructions and then come back to this step to continue the formatting process.

Now that you’ve found the drive you want to format, right-click it and choose Format to open the disk-formatting wizard.

Now is as good a time as any to remind you that you really, really, really need to make sure that this is the right drive. You certainly don’t want to format the wrong hard drive.

• Existing Drive: If you’re formatting a drive that you’ve been using and that has data on it, double-check in Explorer that the drive letter you’re choosing here in Disk Management is the same as the one you see in Explorer that has the information on it that you want to erase. Once formatted, the existing data on the disk are probably unrecoverable for most people.
• New Drive: If you’re formatting a new drive, a great way to tell that it’s the right one is to look at the File System column in the top part of Disk Management. Your existing drives will show file systems of NTFS or FAT32 but a new, unformatted drive will show RAW instead.

You cannot format your C drive, or whatever drive Windows is installed on, from within Windows. In fact, the Format option isn’t even enabled for the drive with Windows on it. See How to Format C for instructions on formatting the C drive.

The first of several formatting details which we’ll cover over the next several steps is the volume label, which is essentially a name given to the hard drive.

In the Volume label textbox, enter whatever name you’d like to give to the drive.

If the drive had a previous name and that makes sense for you, by all means, keep it.

Drive letters are assigned during the Windows partitioning process but can easily be changed after the format is complete. See How to Change Drive Letters after the format process is done if you’d like to do that.

Next up is the file system choice. In the File system textbox, choose NTFS.

NTFS is the most recent file system available and is almost always the best choice. Only choose FAT32 (FAT—which is actually FAT16—isn’t available unless the drive is 2 GB or smaller) if you are specifically told to do so by a program’s instructions that you’re planning on using on the drive. This is not common.

In the Allocation unit size textbox, choose Default. The best allocation size based on the size of the hard drive will be chosen.

It’s not at all common to set a custom allocation unit size when formatting a hard drive in Windows.

Next is the Perform a quick format checkbox. Windows will check this box by default, suggesting that you do a «quick format» but we recommend that you uncheck this box so that a «standard format» is performed.

In a standard format, each individual «part» of the hard drive, called a sector, is checked for errors and overwritten with a zero—a sometimes painfully slow process. This procedure ensures that the hard drive is physically working as expected, that each sector is a reliable place to store data, and that existing data is unrecoverable.

In a quick format, this bad sector search and basic data sanitization is skipped entirely and Windows assumes that the hard drive is free of errors. A quick format is very fast.

You, of course, can do whatever you like—either method will get the drive formatted. However, especially for older and brand new drives, we’d prefer to take our time and do the error checking right now instead of letting our important data do the testing for us later on. The data sanitization aspect of a full format is nice, too, if you’re planning on selling or disposing of this drive.

The final format option is the Enable file and folder compression setting that is unchecked by default, which we recommend sticking with.

The file and folder compression feature allows you to choose files or folders to be compressed and decompressed on the fly, potentially offering considerable savings on hard drive space. The downside here is that performance can be equally affected, making your day-to-day Windows use much slower than it would be without compression enabled.

File and folder compression has little use in today’s world of very large and very inexpensive hard drives. In all but the rarest occasions, a modern computer with a large hard drive is better off protecting all the processing power it can and skipping on the hard drive space savings.

Review the settings you’ve made in the last several steps and then click OK.

As a reminder, here’s what you should see:

• Volume label: [label of your choosing]
• File system: NTFS
• Allocation unit size: Default
• Perform a quick format: unchecked
• Enable file and folder compression: unchecked

Look back at whatever previous steps you need to if you’re wondering why these are the best options.

Windows is usually pretty good about warning you before you might do something damaging, and a hard drive format is no exception.

Click OK to the warning message about formatting the drive.

Just as the warning says, all the information on this drive will be erased if you click OK. You can’t cancel the format process halfway through and expect to have half of your data back. As soon as this starts, there’s no going back. There’s no reason for this to be scary but we do want you to understand the finality of a format.

The hard drive format has begun!

You can check the progress by watching the Formatting: xx% indicator under the Status column in the top part of Disk Management or in the graphical representation of your hard drive in the bottom section.

If you chose a quick format, your hard drive should only take several seconds to format. If you chose the standard format, which we suggested, the time it takes the drive to format will depend almost completely on the size of the drive. A small drive will take a small amount of time to format and a very large drive will take a very long time to format.

Your hard drive’s speed, as well as your overall computer’s speed, play some part but the size is the biggest variable.

In the next step, we’ll look at whether the format completed as planned.

Disk Management in Windows won’t flash a big «Your Format is Complete!» message, so after the format percentage indicator reaches 100%, wait a few seconds and then check again under Status and make sure it’s listed as Healthy like your other drives.

You may notice that now that the format is complete, the volume label has changed to what you set it as (New Drive in our case) and the % Free is listed at 100%. There’s a little overhead involved so don’t worry if your drive isn’t completely empty.

That’s it! Your hard drive has been formatted and it’s ready for use in Windows. You can use the new drive however you want—back up files, store music, and videos, etc.

If you’d like to change the drive letter assigned to this drive, now is the best time to do that. See How to Change a Drive Letter for help.

Formatting Deletes Data—But Doesn’t Always Erase It

When you format a drive in Windows, data may or may not truly be erased. Depending on your version of Windows, and the type of format, it’s possible the data is still there, hidden from Windows and other operating systems but still accessible in certain situations.

See How to Wipe a Hard Drive for instructions on truly removing all the information on a hard drive and Wipe vs Shred vs Delete vs Erase: What’s the Difference? for some helpful clarification.

If the hard drive you’re reformatting won’t ever need to be used again, you can skip the format and the wipe, and physically or magnetically destroy it instead. See How to Completely Erase a Hard Drive for more on these other methods.

More on Formatting Hard Drives in Windows

If you want to format your hard drive so you can install Windows again from scratch, your hard drive will be automatically formatted as part of that process. See How to Clean Install Windows for more on that.

Not happy with the drive letter that Windows assigned during the partitioning process? You’re welcome to change it at any time! See How to Change Drive Letters in Windows to learn how.

You can also format a hard drive via Command Prompt using the format command. See Format Command: Examples, Switches, & More for details on how to do that.