Formatting external hard drive windows 7 ntfs

I do not want to throw it away and buy a new one. Any help would be much appreciated. When your external hard drive becomes RAW file system or write protected due to corrupted file system, the Windows built-in formation methods cannot finish the formatting task as usual.

If you meet the above situation and cannot format external hard drive to NTFS file system, you need a third-party partition manager to force format it.

You can also set partition label to quickly distinguish it from others in future and change cluster size. Still Need Help? Have your problem been solved? Formatting Windows 7 hard drive will erase all the data on the drive and rebuild a file system. If you want to make the hard drive to be readable and writable on different OSes, you can format it as FAT32 , which has the best compatibility with different systems.

But it has a 4 GB file size and 2 TB partition size limit. Windows 7 has its built-in utility Disk Management that can be used to format a hard drive. A detailed tutorial about how to format hard disk Windows Step 1. Step 3. In the next screen, either enter a name to the drive or leave it in the Volume label textbox. Then choose a file system as your wish. If you need to format external hard drive to NTFS, here you can learn how to format hard drive to NTFS file system via Windows built-in tool and a free 3rd party partition manager.

For different operating systems, such as Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, there always is a different file system to organize and store data. So it is of great importance for us to select a proper one for our requirements.

Here are a few popular file systems we should know:. Besides, this file system inherits something popular from FAT32 including the wonderful compatibility. It is quite old like Windows 95, so it works well on some old systems. But it has obvious file and partition size limitations.