NOTE: For the following two sections of this tutorial, we are assuming that you have already plugged in the SD card or the external hard drive, or that you intend to format a hard disk or SSD that is inside your Windows computer or tablet. To help you out, we made this analysis: FAT32, exFAT or NTFS? How to format SD cards, memory sticks and hard drives.

You cannot recover data from a formatted drive, unless you use special recovery software, like the apps from in this comparison: Which are the best free file recovery tools? Comparing 5 of the most popular programs.Īlso, choosing the right file system is an important choice. If you do, make sure that you copy that data to somewhere else, so that you can continue to use it after you format the drive. Before you format it, you should check whether you have any useful data on it, which you may want to keep. It does not matter whether you want to format a USB memory stick, an SD card or a partition on your hard disk. What is different about formatting external storage devices like SD cards, memory sticks or portable hard drives, compared to internal hard disks or SSDsįirst, back up your data and choose the file system.How to format from the Disk Management tool, in all Windows versions How to format an SD Card, a USB memory stick or a hard drive, from File Explorer (in Windows 10 and 8.1) or Windows Explorer (in Windows 7)

First, back up your data and choose the file system.

Format memory stick for mac and pc