Whether you’re looking to wipe a drive for a fresh start, repurposing an old disk for extra storage, or clearing out errors, knowing how to reformat a hard drive in Windows 10 is an essential skill.

Under "Devices and drives," the drive you want to format. Select Format from the menu. Choose your settings:

The first and most critical phase is data preservation. Reformatting permanently deletes all files, documents, photos, and applications on the target drive. Consequently, before initiating any format, the user must back up all valuable data to a separate storage device, such as an external hard drive, a USB flash drive, or a cloud storage service. To verify the contents, open File Explorer, right-click the drive in question, select “Properties,” and review the used space. For the drive containing the Windows 10 operating system (usually the C: drive), a standard format is impossible while the OS is running. In that case, the user must create a Windows 10 installation media on a USB drive using Microsoft’s Media Creation Tool and boot from it to format during a clean installation.

Follow the on-screen prompts to choose your file system and name the drive. Click . Method 3: Using Command Prompt (For Advanced Users)