Formatting Hard Drive

Is it your primary hard drive ?
Reformat hard drive to NTFS Windows XP allows you to easily format the hard drives with its inbuilt utility. Formatting the hard drive would forever delete all the files stored on it. There are two ways in which you can format the hard disk partition - from My Computer and from DOS. You cannot have a NTFS partition with allocation unit s above 4096.

Click on "Start," and then click on "My Computer." Right-click on the disk partition to format and then click on "Format." Click on the "File System" drop down box and select "NTFS." Click on the "Allocation unit " drop down box and select an allocation . It is recommended that you select the "Default allocation " option. Click on the "Start" button. b> Format the Partition from DOS b> Click on "Start," and then click on "Run." Type "cmd" in the 'Run' dialog box and then press "Enter." Type "format drive_letter: /FS:NTFS" at the command prompt and then press "Enter." Replace the 'drive_letter' here with the letter of the drive that you want to format (for example, format e: /FS:NTFS). For help on advanced formatting options, type "format/?'more" at the command prompt and then press "Enter." Keep pressing "Enter" as you read on. Hope it helps

Trying to format a large external USB or Firewire hard drive to the FAT32 file system? Can't do it? Only see an option for formatting the drive using the NTFS file format? Well if you answered yes any of those questions, then you're at the right place.
I was recently trying to format my 1 TB MyBook external hard drive in Windows XP to FAT32 instead of the overly forced-upon NTFS format. Why? Well because I needed to connect it to a NAS device and the NTFS permissions were causing the NAS not to be able to access the drive. Simple solution is to use FAT32, no security, no problems. Though it's sometimes useful to format a USB drive in NTFS format.
Also, formatting a drive in FAT or FAT32 will allow it to be read by other operating systems, such as Mac, Linux, and older versions of Windows such as Windows 98.
Unfortunately, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 will only format a removable drive in FAT32 if it's less than 32GB! Hmmm...that pretty much cuts out ALL modern external hard drives!
However, Windows can format a drive that is larger than 32GB in FAT32, but you have to use the DOS command prompt. However, if you have a drive that is 1TB or larger, you may still get an error saying "The volume is too big for FAT32".
In that case, you can use a free program called SwissKnife that will allow you to format an external hard drive that is up to 2TB in size. Let's go through both methods. In case you are having problems getting your external hard drive to show up in Windows, read my article on how to change the drive letter for an external drive in Windows.
Format external drive in FAT32 using DOSOpen a command window by going to Start, then Run and typing in CMD.

Now type in the following command at the prompt:

format /FS:FAT32 X:
Replace the letter X with the letter of your external hard drive in Windows. Windows will go ahead and begin formatting the drive in FAT32!

Format external hard drive in FAT32 using SwissKnifeSwissKnife is a nifty little program that is completely free and that you can use to format many types of external drives such as USB, Firewire, PCMIA, SATA and SCSI. You can also use it to create partitions on an external hard drive and it formats faster than Windows.

So next time you want to format a hard drive in FAT32 and Windows only gives you an option for NTFS, make sure to follow one of the two method mentioned above. Enjoy!

1. Copy all the important data from this drive to your computer because this method will format the drive and erase all the data on the pen drive.

2. Now download the Apacer Formatting Utility, Unzip this utility to a folder on your hard disk, preferably on a folder on desktop screen for easy access (Do Not Try To Save it on pen drive). Keep your pen drive plugged in, and double click on the Start.bat file in the folder where you unzipped the above utility. This will start formatting your pen drive, wait till the formatting completes and the LED on your pen drive stops blinking. Remove your pen drive after than and plug it in again.

3. You're Done!

The above step will solve the problem. If you still face the problem, follow the below steps:

1. Goto Start > Run, type cmd and press enter, this will open command prompt.
2. Type the following command on the command prompt replacing X with the drive letter of your pen drive.
CHKDSK X: /F

You can't format a computer from the command prompt. the only way to format a hard drive is to get the disk for the operating system. put the disk in the computer then restart the computer. when the computer is starting up at the bottom of the screen will be some commands, one of the commands will to boot from disk. select this option. they the computer will take you through a bunch of screens asking whether or not you want to do this because formatting your hard drive will erase everything on your computer. once you say yes to all these screens you computer will start formatting.

I hope this information was helpful, if you have any comments or questions reply to this post and i will help as much as possible

Try formatting it using command prompt .

Open command prompt window by

start ---> all programs---> accessories------> command prompt

and type format your drives designated name followed by :

example format g:

You need to change your pendrive as there is a manufacturing defect which generally arises after some time of using pendrive

Try formatting it first. If it is not possible to format this way, try to format the drive from the command prompt
Start - Run - type 'cmd' . once inside the command prompt, type the command format drive: where drive is the drive letter

try formatting it from the command prompt.
the command line is 'format drive' . drive is the corresponding drive letter.

hmm...could be a problem with the drive. How are you formatting it? Is it in DOS mode or are your formatting it under Windows? If it's in DOS mode and it's encountering that problem, there's a possiblity that it could be damaged. Don't loose hope, try to run FDISK command on the hard drive. Delete the partitions on it and create a new one. After running FDISK on it, format it again and check if the same problem occurs. If it still occurs, there's a problem on the hard drive.

First u should format disk from disk management mmc snap or from command prompt.without formatting a disk's properties says 0 bytes used and 0 bytes free space.