Disk drive format pdf

Try a different computer: Connect your external storage device to another computer, either a Windows PC or Mac. If the device works properly on macOS but not Windows, it's highly likely that the file system of the device is not Windows-compatible. Run antivirus software: It's possible that the "You need to format the disk in drive before you can use it" error is caused by a virus attack.

Try running your antivirus software to see if that clears the problem. If the methods above aren't successful, don't panic. There are several more options below you can try that will hopefully get your data back safely. Many users have reported that this method has helped them solve the 'format' problem.

It involves entering code, so if you're not confident with this kind of thing, you'll probably want to skip onto the next tip instead. Otherwise, here's what you need to do.

Step 3. Replace "G" with the drive letter of your external storage device. Step 4. Then Windows will start checking and repairing disk errors and damaged files.

Wait for the process to finish. When it has finished, you can try again to read your USB, SD card, or external hard drive after restart your computer. We cover this method in the next tip. If all the above solutions fail to fix the problem, the next course of action is to recover files from your external hard drive, SD card, memory card, USB drive or other storage media first, then reformat the drive.

This allows you to retrieve your data and get the storage device working again, without risking any data loss in the process. This command will create a primary partition with all unallocated space.

You can also replace primary with extended or logical to create an extended or logical partition. To format a hard disk partition via CMD , you just execute the following commands:. You can replace fat32 with ntfs or exfat if necessary. Apart from running commands to create and format partition, you can also make use of Windows built-in Disk Management. To create a partition in Disk Management also requires an unallocated space, so you might need to shrink another partition to get one when necessary.

The specific steps:. Step 4. In the process, you will be asked to format this new partition to a specific file system. For an external hard disk, the exFAT is also available in the file system list.

Using CMD and Disk Management to create and format hard disk partition suffers some limitations as we mentioned above. One of the most significant restrictions is that you cannot create and format a large partition over 32GB as FAT32 file system.

This freeware can directly create a new partition from an existing partition, just like splitting a partition into two. This disk allows you to simply clean up an entire disk within only a few simple clicks.

Once the wiping starts, your data is irrecoverable. Besides, it also provides other useful features to help you manage your disks and partitions flexibly. Daisy is the Senior editor of the writing team for EaseUS. She has been working in EaseUS for over ten years, starting from a technical writer to a team leader of the content group.

As a professional author for over 10 years, she writes a lot to help people overcome their tech troubles. It makes it way easier to play out what will happen after you've made all the changes. I also think the overall look and feel of EaseUS Partition Master Free makes whatever you're doing with your computer's partitions easy.

Partition Master Free can Resize, Move, Merge, Migrate, and Copy disks or partitions; convert to local, change label, defragment, check and explore partition; and much more.

A premium upgrade adds free tech support and the ability to resize dynamic volumes. It won't hot image your drives or align them, but since it's coupled with a partition manager, it allows you do perform many tasks at once, instead of just cloning drives. You can move partitions around, resize them, defragment, and more, along with the other tools you'd expect from a cloning tool. Let it manage your storage drive: resize, format, delete, clone, convert, etc.