This is called 'initializing' the drive.įirst, open the Start Menu on your PC, search for "disk management" and open the Disk Management tool that appears. If you just built a PC, or added a brand new hard drive or SSD to an existing computer, you have to format it before you can actually store data on it. How to format (initialize) a new internal hard drive That's usually not a problem when formatting a drive from a Windows PC, but regardless, this tool ensures you'll never run into that.
For example, Macs sometimes format flash drives with a partition scheme that is incompatible with PCs. You can download it here.Įven though it's intended for SD cards, it's also a great tool for formatting USB drives with all the correct settings to work on every operating system. While the above process will probably work for SD cards in most cases, the SD Association (the organization that develops SD cards) has a tool for properly formatting SD cards.
Once you've chosen your desired settings, click 'Start' and watch the magic happen. You can uncheck this if you want the current data to be harder to recover, but if you're very worried about someone recovering old data from the drive, you should format using a dedicated program. Quick format: This speeds up the formatting process by not overwriting the entire drive with zeros and checking the drive for errors.Volume label: This is what the drive will be labelled as.Allocation unit size: Just leave this at whatever is already selected.(Note that if you intend to put a motherboard BIOS on the USB stick, some boards only look for FAT32 volumes.) However, 32GB is the maximum drive size for FAT32, so Windows might give you an option for exFAT instead, which also has wide compatibility. FAT32 is the best option in most cases, as all operating systems can recognize FAT32 drives. Not every file system will work with every operating system. File system: This determines the way files are stored on the drive.
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