When the format is completed, a warning message will be shown up. After all format settings, click the 'Start' button to continue the process. 'Restore device defaults' button can restore your PC to the default state no matter what drive is selected.'Allocation unit size' option shows the maximum cluster size on the drive.'NTFS' is selected in 'File System' by default.The first option shows the capacity of the selected drive.In the 'Format' window, several format options are shown. Right-click on the hard drive you want to reformat in File Explorer, and select 'Format.'. Open 'File Explorer' and go to 'This PC'. To reformat the external or internal hard drive on Windows 10/8/7, please follow the steps below. When the format counter has reached 100%, the format is finished.Īdditionally, you might want to format your hard drive in order to free up the space of the hard drive or to completely erase the data in it.

After that, just click on 'OK' and close the window.

You can uncheck the box to have a thorough error checking, but the error checking process may take a long time.

By default, 'Perform quick format' option is checked by Windows. In the pop-up window, type the name for the drive in the textbox of the 'Volume label' > enable 'NTFS' for 'File System' and 'Default' for 'Allocation Unit Size' > check 'Perform quick format' option.Locate the target hard drive and right-click on it to choose 'format.' Right-click 'My Computer' and choose 'Manage'.Įxpand 'Storage' to select 'Disk Management'. If you want to format your new hard drive on Windows 10/8/7, you can reach the result with Disk Management. When a completely new hard drive is installed in the computer, it might not show on the File Explorer. How to Format A New Hard Drive on Windows 10/8/7 With FonePaw Data Recovery, just a few steps can successfully restore the data from the formatted hard drive on Windows 10/8/7. In this case, you can employ a data recovery tool - FonePaw Data Recovery (opens new window) to retrieve the files that you need from the formatted hard drive or try it to export the data to PC as a backup. That means it's possible to recover data from a formatted hard drive, when no data has been backed up before. Fortunately, formatting a hard drive does not actually erase all the data from the hard drive, and a space will be marked to store the file data that can be written by Windows before being overwritten. Formatting a hard drive is to wipe out all the data from the drive so as to set up a new file system for the operating system to write and read.

How to reformat windows 10 hard drive