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Why Do You Format USB Flash Drive
The storage devices that are widely used nowadays are typically HDDs and SSDs, which are always set up on a PC/Mac to install the operating system and store data files. Meanwhile, there are many other types of prevailing devices with more flexible features for different purposes. Yes, they are removable storage devices such as USB flash drive. The truth is that no matter what drive you're using, it must have a valid file system so that Windows can recognize it and put it to use.
Oct 13, 2017 - Got a new flash drive? See this step-by-step tutorial on how to format your USB drive on Mac (macOS 10.13 High Sierra) and PC (Windows 10). To share a USB drive between a Mac and a Windows PC, there are two disk formats to choose from: exFAT and FAT32. The other formats -- Microsoft's NTFS.
![Flash Flash](/uploads/1/2/5/8/125838023/255918715.jpg)
What's more, it's inevitable to develop bad sectors or corruption issues on a specified flash drive after a long-time use. By formatting, you can easily fix any USB flash drive, pen drive or memory stick that is write protected, virus infected, corrupted, damaged, unreadable, unrecognized by PC and Mobile.
So here comes the question, how to format a USB flash drive? This page mainly illustrates how to format a USB flash drive using Windows inbuilt Command Prompt, and the following is the detailed guide you should strictly follow.
How to Format USB Flash Drive from Command Prompt
For your information, any form of disk formatting will completely erase data, so backup as many as important files before the start. Altogether, you'll walk through the whole formatting process in eight steps, and the time spent will depend on the USB flash drive capacity and used space on it. (The following steps are performed on Windows 10 PC.)
Step 1: Type cmd in the search box, then you can get the best match called Command Prompt. Right-click on it and choose 'Run as administrator'.
Step 2: On the Command Prompt window, type diskpart and press 'Enter'.
Step 3: Type list disk and press 'Enter'. According to the list disk information, check which disk is your USB flash drive. For example, disk 2.
Step 4: Now type select disk 2 and press 'Enter'.
Step 5: Type clean. Wait some time for disk erasing.
Step 6: Type create partition primary and press 'Enter'.
Step 7: After diskpart successfully created the specified partition, type format fs=ntfs and press 'Enter'. If you prefer other file system formats, change the command ntfs to the desired one such as fat32, exfat, etc.
Step 8: Type assign to create a drive letter to the flash drive.
# Advantages of using cmd
As you know, there is more than one way to perform a formatting task in Windows OS, but why would we recommend you such a complicated approach? It's the most helpful and powerful!
In some cases, you can only use the diskpart command to format a USB flash drive or hard drive. For example:
- The formatting doesn't complete successfully
- Raw drive cannot be fixed and formatted using Disk Management
# Errors you may encounter while using diskpart
- Diskpart format fs=ntfs stuck at 0, 10, 11, 12...completed
Will You Prefer USB Format Tool
Viewing from the noticeable advantages of using cmd to format USB flash drive, we think that you might be interested in an easier way of disk & partition formatting. It's a third-party free partition manager, which is recognized as the best USB format tool. Try it once and you will definitely like it.
![Usb Usb](/uploads/1/2/5/8/125838023/570373480.png)
Step 1: Launch EaseUS Partition Master, right-click the partition on your external hard drive/USB/SD card which you want to format and choose the 'Format' option.
Step 2: Assign a new partition label, file system (NTFS/FAT32/EXT2/EXT3), and cluster size to the selected partition, then click 'OK'.
Step 3: In the Warning window, click 'OK' to continue.
Step 4: Click the 'Execute Operation' button in the top-left corner to review the changes, then click 'Apply' to start formatting your external hard drive/USB/SD card.
You may wish to use an external FireWire or USB hard drive to store your Aperture Library, referenced images, or Vaults. Here are some suggestions on preparing the external hard drive for best performance with Aperture. Many external hard drives come pre-formatted as FAT 32. This is a native Windows file format that can be read by Mac OS X, but is not ideal for use with Aperture.
Before you begin to use your new external hard drive with Aperture, reformat it to the Mac OS Extended file system:
- Be sure your drive is attached and mounted.
- If you have already written any data to the drive, back it up before proceeding to the next step.
- In the Finder, choose Go > Utilities. The /Applications/Utilities folder will open.
- Launch Disk Utility.
- Click the icon for your external hard drive in the sidebar on the left.
- Click the Erase tab along the top of the window.
- From the Volume Format menu, choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
- Enter a name for the external hard drive in the Name field.
- Click the Erase button.
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