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Tim Fisher has 30 years professional technology support experience.

He writes troubleshooting content and is the General Manager of Lifewire.

Ryan Perian is a certified IT specialist who holds numerous IT certifications and has 12 years experience working in the IT industry support and management positions.

To format a hard drive means to erase any information on the drive and to set up a file system so your operating system can read data from, and write data to, the drive.

You need to format a hard drive if you plan on using it in Windows.

As complicated as that might sound, this isnt really difficult to do in any version of Windows.

All operating systems offer this capability and Windows makes it easy.

See our article How to Partition a Hard Drive in Windows for instructions.

Once partitioned, return to this page for help formatting the drive.

Follow these easy steps to format a hard drive in Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, or Windows XP.

Opening Disk Management can be done a number of ways depending on your version of Windows, but the easiest method is to type diskmgmt.msc in the Run dialog box or the Start menu.

Another way to open Disk Management is through Control Panel.

After Disk Management opens, which might take several seconds, look for the drive you want to format from the list at the top.

Theres a lot of information in Disk Management, so if you cant see everything, maximize the window.

Look for the amount of storage on the drive as well as the drive name.

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For example, if it says Music for the drive name and it has 2 GB of hard drive space, then youve likely selected a small flash drive full of music.

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Feel free to open the drive to make sure that its what you want to format if it makes you confident that youre going to format the right device.

Partitioning is something that must be done before a hard drive is formatted.

See our article How to Partition a Hard Drive for instructions and then come back to this step to continue the formatting process.

Now that youve found the drive you want to format, right-click it and choose Format to open the disk-formatting wizard.

Once formatted, the existing data on the disk are probably unrecoverable for most people.

Your existing drives will show file systems of NTFS or FAT32 but a new, unformatted drive will show RAW instead.

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