About Hard Drive Format in Windows 10

Before you can store data on hard drive in Windows 10, you require formatting the hard drive. Formatting hard drive means erasing everything that’s on your hard drive and then Windows 10 can write data and read data from it. If you want to format your hard drive, make sure you have partitioned your hard drive in Windows 10.

Ways to Format Hard Drive in Windows 10

In daily life, you may meet some situations which cause you to format Windows 10 hard drive. For instance, your partition has been ruined by viruses or there is a few bad sectors and you plan to wipe them from your PC; or you try to upgrade your present hard drive to a larger one, you must format it and then you are allowed to save data on it. To satisfy the demand, we show you how to format hard drive in Windows 10 as follows:
Disk Management
Disk Management in Windows 10 is a built-in tool which enables you to format/create/delete/extend/shrink partition without rebooting system. If you want to use this tool to format hard drive, you should open Disk Management by one of the following ways at first.

• Right click This PC>Manage>Disk Management
• Click start menu and then type Disk Management to search
• Click start menu and type cmd to open command line and then input compmgmt.msc and then click Enter
• Press “windows + R” to open the command line and then enter “diskmgmt.msc” to launch Disk Management

Step1: After open Disk Management, right click the partition you need to format (partition D) and then choose Format.
Step2:In the pop-up window, you can set file system and cluster size and then click OK.
With Disk Management in Windows 10, only the partition whose size is smaller than 32GB can be formatted from NTFS to FAT32. But if your partition is larger than 32GB and you hope to format from NTFS to FAT32, how can you do?
AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard
AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard is a free software which is designed for partition management. It can help you format hard drive in Windows 10 even you format partition larger than 32GB from NTFS to FAT32.
Before you do:

• Before you format, you can use free backup software – AOMEI Backupper Standard to backup data.
• In order to make sure OS works properly, AOMEI Partition Assistant will not allow you to format system partition and boot partition. However, if you do need to format system partition or boot partition, you need to create a bootable media with AOMEI Partition Assistant first, after that, you can format these partitions by entering Bootable Media. In this situation, you should reset the start order of your computer from the original location to the bootable media you created. To do this, sometimes, you need to change the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) settings of your PC.

Step1: Download AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, install, and launch it. choose the partition you want to format and select Format Partition.
Step2: In the pop-up window, you can set the type of file system, the size of cluster. And then click OK.
Step3: To execute the operations, please click Apply. Then you can successfully format hard drive in Windows 10.
Actually, formatting doesn’t really erase the data, because anybody can recover data from the formatted partition with software. Therefore, in order to protect your personal information, you can use wipe partition in this software. Apart from these features, AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard allows you migrate OS to SSD, convert between MBR and GPT, make bootable CD and more wonderful features.