Pendrives or USB thumb drives are very popular in our life due to their portability and tiny size. It is beneficial to create a bootable USB flash drive and even a Windows To Go drive for faster Windows installation. If you purchased a new pen drive without formatting, to use it, you have to format it. Without formatting, you can’t copy any files/folders in your Pendrive. Disk formatting is a built-in feature of every operating system. You may use Windows 11/ 10/ 8/ 7. You can manage the disk in every operating system regardless of the OS version. The operating system can recognize only the formatted disk structure. So, if you have purchased a new Pendrive without formatting or creating a new partition, you need to perform the formatting action to use it normally.

One can perform the pen drive or USB drive formatting using the following methods:-
- File Explorer
- Disk Management Tool
- Command Prompt
- Windows PowerShell
- USB Disk Storage Format Tool
Note: If your Pen Drive or USB flash drive is write-protected or read-only, you will not be able to format it using these methods. First, you need to remove write-protection or read-only, then you can proceed with further steps.
Topics Covered
How to Format a Pen Drive or USB Drive with File Explorer?
Formatting a Pen Drive or USB flash drive using File Explorer is quite fast, do the following:-
Step 1. Open File Explorer or Windows Explorer by pressing
Step 2. On the File Explorer, right-click on the USB Drive or Pen Drive and select the
Step 3. A Format dialog box opens. If you want, change the File system, Allocation Unit Size, etc., and then click on the
Step 4. A dialog box opens. Click
Step 5. You should see a “Format Complete” message.
Step 6. Click
That’s all!!! Formatting is completed now.
How to Format a Pen Drive or USB Drive with Disk Management Tool?
Step 1. Right-click on “Computer” or “This PC” and select
Step 2. It will open the “Computer Management” window.

Step 3. Under Storage, click
Note: Alternatively, you can also access Disk Management by typing “diskmgmt.msc” in the Run box.
Step 4. Right-click the Pendrive and select the “Format” option.

Step 5. It will launch a new window with formatting options. Here, you can change the Volume label, File system, etc.
Step 6. Once you are ready with the above options, click
How to Format Pen Drive or USB Disk with Command Prompt?
Step 1. To format your Pendrive with a command prompt, open the command prompt by typing
Step 2. Right-click on
Now, Command Prompt opens with administrator privileges.
Step 3. At the command prompt window, type
Step 4. Now type

This command will list all internal volumes/disk partitions as well as external drives too. In my example, Volume 4 with the drive letter “E” is Pendrive which I want to format.

Step 5. Type
Note: If your PC Pendrive volume number is different, change 4 to that number. Suppose, in your computer, volume 10 is a USB drive, then the command will be
Step 6. Now issue the following command to format your Pendrive:-
format fs=ntfs quick
Note: If you want to format your pen drive to other file systems like exFAT, replace the command with format fs=exfat quick. If you want to format your Pendrive to other file systems like exFAT, replace the command with format fs=fat32 quick.
Now, Pendrive formatting is started. Depending upon the size and speed of Pendrive, it may take a few minutes. Finally, you should get a message “DiskPart successfully formatted the volume.”
Quick Tips:- If you don’t want to type the command, copy the command using
By a similar method, you can format any internal drive of your computer.
How to Format a Pen Drive or USB Drive using Windows PowerShell?
Windows PowerShell is an advanced command-line tool. One can also format a Pen Drive or USB Thumb Drive using it. Perform the following recommended steps to format a disk:-
Step 1. Open the PowerShell with administrative privilege.
Step 2. In the elevated Windows PowerShell, type the following and hit
Get-Disk
The above command will show the disk information. Please note down the number associated with your USB flash drive. For example, number 1 is my USB flash drive.
Step 3. Now, type the following line and press
Clear-Disk -Number # -RemoveData
Note: In the above command line, replace the
Clear-Disk -Number 1 -RemoveData
When prompted, type
Once you complete the above command, the USB drive will be formatted, and also drive letter will be removed. That means data is erased from USB Drive or Pen Drive and will not be visible in File Explorer.
Step 4. To make it visible in File Explorer, you need to create a partition and assign a Drive Letter. Issue the following command now:-
New-Partition -DiskNumber # -UseMaximumSize -IsActive -DriveLetter NewDriveLetter
Note: In the above command, replace
For my case, the command will be following:-
New-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -UseMaximumSize -IsActive -DriveLetter D
Once you execute the above command, the partition is created and a drive letter is assigned to your USB drive.
A dialog box will open to format your USB drive. Click on the “Format disk” button.
Once the formatting is completed, it will become visible in File Explorer and will become usable. You can put data on your USB flash drive.
If you are not being prompted to format the disk, you can issue the following command on PowerShell to format it:-
Format-Volume -DriveLetter NewDriveLetter -FileSystem NewFileSystem -NewFileSystemLabel VolumeLabel
Note: Replace
For instance, we have used the following command:-
Format-Volume -DriveLetter D -FileSystem NTFS -NewFileSystemLabel gearupwindows
How to Format a Pen Drive or USB Drive using USB Disk Storage Format Tool?
USB Disk Storage Format Tool is a freeware application and is only 557KB in size. To format a USB flash drive or Pen Drive, download the latest version of the USB Disk Storage Format Tool from here. Install it on your computer and then launch it. Select the USB drive and click on the “Format Disk” button.
Apart from the cleaning, it features the following:-
- Erase all data and delete space on flash drives that are not possible using built-in Windows formatting.
- Remove any tracks of malicious software that may have infected your USB flash drive.
- Check and correct partition errors, if any.
- Create a volume label for USB disk drives.
- Scan drives for errors before formatting.
- Create a FAT32 volume larger than 32 GB.