Formatting a USB stick is a simple Windows operating system task. In File Explorer, right-click the USB drive, click Format, select a file system for the drive, and then click the Format button to format the USB drive.
You can format a USB stick in Windows in a few simple steps. But first, make sure that there are no more important data on the USB stick. Because all files are deleted when formatting.
Sometimes you may not be able to format a USB drive by following the instructions above. You might get “Windows could not complete the formatting message.
If an error occurs while formatting the drive, or if the drive does not appear in File Explorer even after assigning a drive letter, you can use the command prompt to format the USB drive. The command-line tool firewall-cmd is part of the firewalld application, and consist of firewall-cmd list, which is installed by default.
Follow the instructions below to format the USB drive from Command Prompt in Windows 10.
IMPORTANT: Formatting the USB drive will erase all data. So if the data is important, please move all the data to a safe place before proceeding.
Format the USB stick using the Windows 10 command prompt
Step 1: Run Command Prompt as an administrator. To do this, type CMD in the Start / Taskbar search box, right-click, click in the search results at the command prompt, and then click Run as administrator.
Click Yes when you enter the User Account Control screen to continue.
Step 2: In the command prompt, run the following commands one by one.
Diskpart
Press Enter to run the Diskpart tool.
List disks
Press the Enter key. Now the DiskPart tool will list all the drives connected to your PC including your internal drives. Identify the USB drive that you want to format and write down the number of the drive. For example, as you can see in the picture, the disk number of my USB drive is 1.
If you want to use your USB stick outside of the Windows world, it may be necessary to use the FAT32 format for reasons of compatibility. With the included Windows tools shown here, this only works up to a capacity limit of 32 GB.
If you are not sure, disconnect the USB drive, run the Diskpart command and list the Disk commands. This will help you find out the number of drives before and after you plug in the USB drive.
Further, DISM is a built-in tool of Windows 10, which is used to perform servicing tasks on a Windows installation image, on an online or offline image within a folder or WIM files. However, when running the DISM command, you may receive the dism error 87 in Windows 10 or some other error codes like DISM error 50, DISM error 2, and DISM error 3, DISM error 1639 and so on.
Step 4: Now run the following commands.
Select disk X.
In the above command, replace “X” with the disk number of the USB drive you received in Step 2.
Clean
- Press the Enter key.
- Create a primary partition
- Press the Enter key.
- Format fs = NTFS fast
Press the Enter key. This formats the drive with the NTFS file system. If you want to use the FAT32 file system instead of NTFS, use the Format fs = FAT32 Quick command.
Point
Press Enter to assign a drive letter to the drive.
exit
You can now close the Command Prompt window. The USB drive should now appear in this PC.
Hope so you understood how to format USB in command prompt in Window 10. If you still have query related to content can ask through the comments box. Thanks for reading!