Emily Long is a freelance writer based in Salt Lake City. After graduating from Duke University, she spent several years reporting on the federal workforce for Government Executive, a publication of ...

Formatting your hard drive is an important step in setting up your computer. It clears all the data off the disk so that you can start fresh. DiskPart is a powerful command-line tool that allows you ...

Before we begin, it’s important to know that formatting a drive will erase everything on it, so you’ll want to make sure that you back up or save anything that you don’t want to lose. After you’ve ...

“Format” as a word in computers is very popular, and a well-known word among computer users. We all have done that, especially with USB drives. That said, what people are sometimes afraid of is when ...

There's more to it than you might think. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Knowing how to format a hard drive seems like something ...

You may need to format a hard drive to match your computer's operating system before you can use it. To format a hard drive in Windows, you'll use the Disk Management utility; on a Mac, you'll use ...

This how-to shows you the steps using Disk Utility 13 in OS X 10.10 Yosemite, but the process is the same if you’re using OS X 10.9 Mavericks or 10.8 Mountain Lion. Here are the instructions using OS ...

With the release of El Capitan, Apple took the opportunity to give Disk Utility a facelift. You can still use the software to format a startup drive—it’s similar ...

Most external hard drives come formatted with the FAT file system, which makes the drive compatible with multiple operating systems. As such, the drive is immediately usable out of the box. If you ...

If you try to format a hard drive on your Windows 11/10 system and you receive an error that says Windows cannot format this drive, then this post will help you with ...

When you purchase a new storage drive, it may tell you it needs reformatting, but which format is best? The main options for removable drives and memory cards these days are FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS, ...