For an end-user, formatting the USB drive is easy. All you need to do is right-click on the drive, and select Format. However, if you want to format a USB pen drive using the Command Prompt, here is how you can do it in Windows 10/8/7.
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| How to Format USB Drive in Command Prompt in Windows |
Format USB Pen Drive using CMD
When using the Command Prompt, you have two methods. One is using a simple format command while the other is using Diskpart. We will show both the processes.
- Using Format Command
- Using Diskpart tool.
When using the Diskpart tool, you will need admin privileges. You can also use PowerShell instead of CMD.
“Hi, guys. I am unable to format a 32GB Simple tech USB Flash drive. The formatting process starts as usual, towards the end “Windows cannot format USB flash drive" and everything stops. Open Disk Management, click Format, but same result. What else can I do? Any help will be greatly appreciated.”
Usually, you can format USB drives in Disk Management and File Explorer easily. However, like the user above, sometimes you cannot finish the formatting operations as expected. That might be caused by USB drive read-only, virus attack, USB corrupted bad sectors or other unknown factors.
How to format the USB drive in Command Prompt?
When you fail to format a USB drive in Windows Disk Management or File Explorer, you can format USB drive through Command Prompt. Also known as CMD, cmd, or cmd.exe, the Command Prompt is a command-line interpreter application in most Windows operating systems. You can use it to execute some commands to manage the disk partition in a Windows computer.
Step 1. Launch and run Command Prompt as Administrator: Click the “Start” button and enter “cmd” in the search box; then right-click “Command Prompt” and select “Run as Administrator”.
Step 2. Then type “Diskpart” and press “Enter” to launch Diskpart to format USB drive.
Step 3. In the subsequent window, type the following commands one by one, and press “Enter” after each one.
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| How to Format USB Drive in Command Prompt in Windows |
● list disk: all disks on your computer will be listed along with a number.
● select disk #: # is the number of the USB drive
● clean: all data on the selected disk will be cleaned.
● create partition primary
● select partition 1
● format fs=ntfs quick: you can replace NTFS with fat32 or exfat when necessary.
● assign letter f: give the formatted partition with a specific drive letter. Then you can access it from Windows File Explorer.
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