If you use your USB Flash Drive on computers with different operating systems (OS), you may find that you have trouble formatting it. Formatting is just a technical term for a clean erase of the drive. Formatting a USB Flash Drive can be tricky if the drive partition has been modified, which can happen when using the drive on different type systems. Or maybe you just want to give your USB Flash Drive a fresh new life? With a few easy steps you can reformat your USB Flash Drive back to it’s standard FAT32 format.
We’ll be using Windows 7 DiskPart (most likely already installed on your pc – if not download DiskPart here).
Here’s how to do it:
- Plug the USB Flash drive into the computer.
- Open the DiskPart Utility by typing diskpart in the Start Menu dialog box, then press enter.
- At the DiskPart Utitlty command prompt type list disk and press enter. This will list all the hard drives and flash drives on you computer.
WARNING: BE SURE TO SELECT THE CORRECT DRIVE.
In this sample Disk 0 and Disk 1 are measured in GB (Gigabytes). They are large hard drives in the computer. Disk 2 is measured in MB (Megabytes) and is the USB Flash drive we are looking for. If you are unsure which Disk is your USB Flash drive, close the program, remove the USB Flash drive from the computer, and restart the DiskPart program and see which drive is missing. The missing drive is the USB Flash drive. Now close the program, plug in the USB Flash drive, and restart DiskPart. You should now see the USB Flash drive that was missing.
- Now type select disk X where “X” is actually the disk number of the USB Flash drive. Then press enter. In this sample it’s disk 2.
- Type clean at the prompt and press enter. This will erase the USB Flash drive. There is NO BACKING OUT after this point. All your old data on the USB Flash drive WILL BE ERASED.
- Once cleaning is finished, type create partition primary and press enter. This will create a primary partition on the USB Flash drive.
- Next type active and press enter. This will make the partition active (usable).
- The last step is to format the USB Flash drive so you can once again store files on it. At the command prompt type format fs=fat32 quick (quick, will do a fast format).
The USB Flash drive now has a fresh file system and is ready for use.
