How To Format External Hard Drive Windows Vista
How To Format Hard Drive And Reinstall Windows Vista

How to Reformat Windows 7 - Formatting the Hard Drive by Reinstalling Windows 7 Backup all your files and settings so that you can restore them later. Find your Windows 7 product key: Start your computer. Shut down your computer. Restart your computer. Press any key when you see the prompt.
Starting Clean How to format new hard drive on Windows 10 Formatting is an essential task before starting to use a new drive, and in this guide, we'll show you how to do it on Windows 10.

You need to format a hard drive if you plan on using it in Windows.

To format a hard drive means to erase any information on the drive and to set up a file system so your operating system can read data from, and write data to, the drive.

Delete all the partitions on the hard drive. This will allow Windows Setup to make maximum use of the hard drive, and is typically safe in older, pre-UEFI machines. To delete a partition, simply click on the partition in the list and click on Delete. The partition should either become “unallocated space”.

As complicated as that might sound, it's not really difficult to format a hard drive in any version of Windows. All operating systems offer this capability and Windows makes it easy.

If the hard drive you want to format has never been used or was just wiped clean, it must first be partitioned. See our article How to Partition a Hard Drive in Windows for instructions. Once partitioned, return to this page for help formatting the drive.

Time Required: The time it takes to format a hard drive in Windows depends almost entirely on the drive's size, but your computer's overall speed plays a part, too.

How to Format a Hard Drive in Windows

Follow these easy steps to format a hard drive in Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, or Windows XP:

Open Disk Management, the hard drive manager included with all versions of Windows.
Opening Disk Management can be done a number of ways depending on your version of Windows, but the easiest method is to type diskmgmt.msc in the Run dialog box or the Start menu.
Another way to open Disk Management is through Control Panel.
After Disk Management opens, which might take several seconds, look for the drive you want to format from the list at the top. There's a lot of information in Disk Management, so if you can't see everything, maximize the window.
Look for the amount of storage on the drive as well as the drive name. For example, if it says Music for the drive name and it has 2 GB of hard drive space, then you've likely selected a small flash drive full of music.
Feel free to open the drive to make sure that it's what you want to format if it makes you confident that you're going to format the right device.
If you don't see the drive listed on the top or an Initialize Disk windows appears, it probably means that the hard drive is new and has not yet been partitioned. Partitioning is something that must be done before a hard drive is formatted. See our article How to Partition a Hard Drive for instructions and then come back to this step to continue the formatting process.
Now that you've found the drive you want to format, right-click it and choose Format to open the disk-formatting wizard.
Now is as good a time as any to remind you that you really, really, really need to make sure that this is the right drive. You certainly don't want to format the wrong hard drive.
- Existing Drive: If you're formatting a drive that you've been using and that has data on it, double-check in Explorer that the drive letter you're choosing here in Disk Management is the same as the one you see in Explorer that has the information on it that you want to erase. Once formatted, the existing data on the disk are probably unrecoverable for most people.
- New Drive: If you're formatting a new drive, a great way to tell that it's the right one is to look at the File System column in the top part of Disk Management. Your existing drives will show file systems of NTFS or FAT32 but a new, unformatted drive will show RAW instead.
You cannot format your C drive, or whatever drive Windows is installed on, from within Windows. In fact, the Format option isn't even enabled for the drive with Windows on it. See How to Format C for instructions on formatting the C drive.
The first of several formatting details which we'll cover over the next several steps is the volume label, which is essentially a name given to the hard drive.
In the Volume label textbox, enter whatever name you'd like to give to the drive.
If the drive had a previous name and that makes sense for you, by all means, keep it.
Drive letters are assigned during the Windows partitioning process but can easily be changed after the format is complete. See How to Change Drive Letters after the format process is done if you'd like to do that.
Next up is the file system choice. In the File system textbox, choose NTFS.
NTFS is the most recent file system available and is almost always the best choice. Only choose FAT32 (FAT — which is actually FAT16 — isn't available unless the drive is 2 GB or smaller) if you are specifically told to do so by a program's instructions that you're planning on using on the drive. This is not common.
In the Allocation unit size textbox, choose Default. The best allocation size based on the size of the hard drive will be chosen.
It's not at all common to set a custom allocation unit size when formatting a hard drive in Windows.
Next is the Perform a quick format checkbox. Windows will check this box by default, suggesting that you do a 'quick format' but we recommend that you uncheckthis box so that a 'standard format' is performed.
In a standard format, each individual 'part' of the hard drive, called a sector, is checked for errors and overwritten with a zero — a sometimes painfully slow process. This procedure ensures that the hard drive is physically working as expected, that each sector is a reliable place to store data, and that existing data is unrecoverable.
In a quick format, this bad sector search and basic data sanitization is skipped entirely and Windows assumes that the hard drive is free of errors. A quick format is very fast.
You, of course, can do whatever you like — either method will get the drive formatted. However, especially for older and brand new drives, we'd prefer to take our time and do the error checking right now instead of letting our important data do the testing for us later on. The data sanitization aspect of a full format is nice, too, if you're planning on selling or disposing of this drive.
The final format option is the Enable file and folder compression setting that is unchecked by default, which we recommend sticking with.
The file and folder compression feature allows you to choose files or folders to be compressed and decompressed on the fly, potentially offering considerable savings on hard drive space. The downside here is that performance can be equally affected, making your day-to-day Windows use much slower than it would be without compression enabled.
File and folder compression has little use in today's world of very large and very inexpensive hard drives. In all but the rarest occasions, a modern computer with a large hard drive is better off protecting all the processing power it can and skipping on the hard drive space savings.
Review the settings you've made in the last several steps and then click OK.
- Volume label: [label of your choosing]
- File system: NTFS
- Allocation unit size: Default
- Perform a quick format: unchecked
- Enable file and folder compression: unchecked
Look back at whatever previous steps you n

How To Reformat Hard Drive Windows Vista