How to Format Hard Drive Simple 8 Steps Here

Procedure to Format an External Hard Drive

To learn how to format hard drive, get some simple and quick steps in this article. If an external hard drive is not compatible with your computer or laptop, change the file system and format the drive to make it compatible. Also, be cautious that formatting an external drive may cause deletion of all the data on your external hard drive.
Turn on your computer or laptop from which you are going to format the external hard drive. Plug the external hard drive or USB drive to your computer. Make sure that you have connected the external hard drive to the appropriate slot on your laptop. If you are connecting using your computer, find the appropriate slot on the CPU and plug the external drive. Search and open the file manager on your computer.
Click This PC or My Computer on the sidebar when you open the file manager. Check the list storage icons displays on the screen under Devices and Drives. Select the external storage name. If you could not find the external storage, eject the external storage device and reconnect it to a different slot.
When you click on the external hard drive name, you will be able to view the Manage option on the menu bar.

Click the Manage tab. Click the Format option that displays under the Manage tab. Now, the Format dialog box opens on your screen.
Choose any one of the File System from the drop-down list. If you are going to use the hard drive only in Windows, select the NTFS option. Select the FAT32 option if you are going to use the hard drive on Mac and Windows, but the storage limit is restricted to 32 gigabytes with a separate file size up to 4 gigabytes.
Use the exFAT option to use your external hard drive on multiple devices like Windows, Macintosh, Linux, etc. exFAT is mostly similar to FAT32 but has no storage limit. If you do not need the deep formatting option, click on the checkbox next to Quick Format. Click the Start option to start the formatting process.
When the computer or laptop displays Format Complete, click OK. Check and confirm whether the external hard drive is formatted. For safety and to avoid loss of files, back up the files and folders from the external hard drive to your computer hard drive before formatting. Once the formatting process completes, restore the files to your hard drive if necessary. Click Next and Finish the How to Format Hard Drive process.