Summary: In this blog, you will learn how to format USB flash drive using cmd in various versions of Windows. You can format a write protected, corrupted or inaccessible USB flash drive or pen drive using command prompt.
The most widely used storage devices nowadays are SSDs and HDDs, which are set up on a Mac or PC to store the data files and install the OS. Also, there are some other devices having more flexibility and features. These are the storage devices which can be removed such as USB flash drive. But, there must be a valid file system in the drive that you are using irrespective of its type so that it can be recognized by the Windows and can be used.
With the usage of flash drive, some bad sectors and corruption issues arise on USB flash drive. But, don’t worry, you can fix any USB flash drive or a memory drive which is write protected or corrupted by formatting it. Formatting is always a good way to get rid of unwanted virus/malware or errors. But, the question arises, how to format USB flash drive? Well, you can simply follow the below steps to remove the write protection in a USB flash drive so that you’ll be able to format the USB drive with ease. Here is the detailed procedure that you should follow.
Step 1: Scan the USB drive and remove viruses
Connect your USB flash drive to the computer. Now, right click on it and enable your Antivirus to scan it manually.
If there is any virus found on your system, remove it using the Antivirus.
Step 2: Remove the write protection in USB flash drive using Diskpart command line utility
There is a disk-partitioning tool known as Diskpart which is built-in Windows and can be accessed through the Command Line Utility. It gives a complete information about the volumes and partitions, allows to delete and create partitions and extends the NTFS volumes.
- Go to start menu and in the search box, type cmd and right-click on cmd.exe After that, select the option Run as administrator.
- In the command prompt window, type DISKPART and hit a click on Enter.
- Now, type LIST DISK and hit Enter.
It will show the two disks available i.e. Hard Disk Drive (HDD) as Disk 0 and USB flash drive as Disk 1.
- Type in SELECT DISK 1 and press Enter. It will show that Disk 1 is now the selected disk.
- Now, type ATTRIBUTES DISK and press the Enter key. It will display you a message Current Read-only State: Yes.
- Finally, write the command ATTRIBUTES DISK CLEAR READONLY to remove the write protection. If the command works, it will be confirmed by a message Disk attributes cleared successfully.
Step 3: Format the USB flash drive
The last step comes to format USB drive. By performing this task, you can make your USB flash drive able to write and read. Before you format it, check ite file system. So, you can go through these steps.
- In the Windows Explorer, hit a right-click on the USB flash drive and select the Properties option. Now, in the General tab, you can see that the File system is NTFS.
- After closing the properties window, again right click on USB drive and select the option Format.
- In the File system, select NTFS, and click on Start to proceed.
- At last, a warning window will prompt. Click OK to confirm this.
Using the above steps, you can successfully format USB flash drive. Now, what if you want to restore back your data stored in that drive in case you don’t have a backup. Don’t worry, you can take the help of Removable media data recovery software.
You can also use this software if you don’t want to perform the above steps to format USB flash drive using cmd. You can simply use this Removable Media Data Recovery software to recover all your precious data. All the common file formats are supported in it. It is a very reliable utility that can be used without any technical expertise.
