Also you can enter a name for the drive under Volume Label. Step 3: On the formatting window, select Quick Format option, choose file system format, and click Start. Step 2: Right-click on the external hard disk and select “Format” option from context menu. Note: if you have stored data to the drive, please back it up before formatting the disk. Step 1: Connect your external hard drive with your computer and open Windows Explorer to check if it can be recognized. Method #1: Format external hard drive in Windows Sometimes external hard drive may become RAW or reports errors like “ The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable”, you can fix these errors by formatting the volume after file recovery. Many users would format it to clear virus and avoid more damages. Since external hard drive might be used on many computers, it tends to infect virus.

Formatting can clear data fragmentation quickly and easily. This is a good solution to delete data and free up disk space. Quick formatting is able to format a partition within seconds, and all data on the volume will be deleted. To quickly remove content from external hard drive.

To change file system type, formatting should be done. The brand-new disk you purchase might not be formatted to the file system type you need.

Format external hard drive to required file system.

Still many users would like to format the external hard drives and people do that due to various reasons:

Why do you want to format an external hard drive?Ī brand-new external hard drive is usually partitioned into s single partition with NTFS file system. You should create a backup for important data before formatting if the disk contains significant files. The formatting process removes all data on the partition and thus causes data loss. Regardless of the brand or model, the first thing you may need to do after purchasing an external hard drive might be partitioning and formatting it.įormatting external disk can be done via various methods and it can be formatted to a range of file system so that you can use the disk under different operating system platforms. You can connect external hard drive to computer via USB cable and then transfer data with internal hard drive. About formatting external hard driveĮxternal hard drive is popular storage device and it can be used to store all kinds of digital information such as images, documents, apps, emails, etc. This article shows you how to format an external hard drive via different methods, and you can follow these methods to format external hard drive for PC, Mac or Linux.

External disk format for mac and pc