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Format Hard Drive

  • To clean the OS on a hard drive, formatting is the primary job.

  • If the hard drive is corrupted, or we got file system error we need formatting.

  • There are several ways to completely erase and format a hard drive.

On Windows OS

  • We can format the drives expect "C" drive on the Operating System.

  • This is the same way we format an external drive in Windows.

  • Open Windows Explorer, click the "Computer" section in the sidebar.

  • Right-click on the drive and choose "Format."

  • Righ click on a drive 

  • Click on Format

  • Under "File System," choose the file system you want to use.

  • Give your drive a name.

  • Click "Start" to format the drive.

  • You'll get a notification when it's done.

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  • Click on Start

On Command Prompt

  • Sometime while formatting, we might get some incompatible file system error and so on.

  • So formatting Hard Drive is helpful.

  • Here we are going to format the Hard Drive in command prompt.

  • To change the partition style MBR to GTP we need to clean the drive.

  • In the same way, we can format other external drives as well.

  • In a command line, type diskpart and press enter.

  • Now type list disk and press enter.

  • All the disk drives will be listed, including pen drive.

  • Type select disk 0.

  • For example, select disk 0 for Hard Drive, disk 1 form pendrive.  

  • Go on to type clean. 

  • This step starts to clean up all files and folders on the selected hard disk.

  • Here I entered convert GPT for changing the partition style of my Hard Disk Drive. 

  • For an external drive, there are other commands.

  • After cleaning, type create partition primary > enter > format fs=ntfs > enter.

  • Finally for assigning a drive, type assign and enter.

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