To do that, type CMD in the Start/taskbar search field, right-click on the Command Prompt entry and then click Run as administrator option.Ĭlick the Yes button when you get the User Account Control screen. Step 1: Open the Command Prompt as administrator. If you want to convert your drive from NTFS to FAT32 without losing data, use the tool mentioned in Method 3 (scroll down to see). Please back up all data to another location before proceeding. IMPORTANT: Formatting the drive will delete all data on the drive. If you cannot wait for hours, please use the tool mentioned in Method 2 of this guide. Please note that formatting large USB drives to FAT32 might take hours. This is the walk through on how to format USB drive via command line.Use Command Prompt to format USB to FAT32 DISKPART> CleanĭiskPart succeeded in creating the specified partition.ĭiskPart marked the current partition as active.

Note here I chose to format in NTFS you may use format such as FAT32 etc. Select disk x (x represents your USB drive)*įor the example here my disk is #4, it should look something like below. This should give you something look like below. Type “ DISKPART” and Hit Enter, from the diskpart prompt, type “ list disk” and hit enter.

Today we will go over how to format USB drive via the command line. While do this via GUI is simple and easy, if you want to repeat this for several USBs or automate this action, you probably want to do that via the command line to run as a batch script. You plug in the USB drive and find it Windows File Explorer, and right-click > Format. Formatting a USB Drive can be pretty straightforward.

Windows 10 how to format usb drive