How to format a hard drive on Windows

Open the Start Menu, and enter the word format. Select Create and format hard disk partitions.

Alternatively, you can open the Disk Management tool by right-clicking a hard drive under This PC and selecting Format.

The Disk Management tool will load a list of hard drives connected to your machine. You can format external hard drives, flash drives, and internal drives from this list. Right-click the hard drive you want to format and select Format. Enter a name for the hard drive in the Volume Label field. Set the File system and Allocation unit size from the drop-down menu.

Open the Start Menu, and type cmd. Right-click Command Prompt and choose Run as Administrator.

When Command Prompt opens, type diskpart then press enter.

Type list disk then press enter. This will show everything from hard drives to USB drives. Note the number assigned to the hard drive you want to format.

Type select disk # to select a specific drive. Replace the # sign with the actual disk number. For example, you would use select disk 2 to select the second disk. Press enter.

Type clean and press enter. Next, enter create partition primary and press enter.

You need to define a file system format. For example, you can implement a NTFS file system with this command: format fs=ntfs

After you've successfully formatted the drive, you need to assign it a letter. Type the word assign and press enter. Congratulations! Your drive is formatted and ready to go.