How to Reformat an Internal or External Hard Drive on Windows 10?

Part 1: How to Reformat an Internal or External Hard Drive on Windows 10?

First, you should check whether you have logged in the administrator account. If not, you will not have the permission to format or reformat a hard drive.

Reformat Disk with Disk Management

1. Press the keys [Win+X]; select [Computer Management]; click [Disk Management] at the left side.

2. Right-click at the letter of the target hard drive and then select [Format].

3. Select a suitable file system and then click [OK] to confirm the settings.

Reformat Disk in This PC

1. Connect the external hard drive. Then, open [This PC] and find out the target hard drive. Right-click at it and select [Format].

2. Select a suitable file system and click [Start] to begin formatting.

Part 2: How to Recover Formatted Data?

How if you accidentally delete data from the hard drive? Renee Undeleter is here to help you! Renee Undeleter is comprehensive software for data recovery. Besides recovering many file types, it can recover data from the formatted hard drive well.

Renee Undeleter is designed with three scan types respectively used for files, partitions and disks. It enables users to select a suitable recovery mode. The clear interface is also friendly to newbie.

1. Open Renee Undeleter and select [Whole Partition Scan].

2. Select the target hard drive and click [Next] to go on. After that, select [Fast Scan] or [Deep Scan].

3. The scan time depends on the capacity of the hard drive. If the capacity is large, the scan time will be long. As the scan is finished, you can select the target files and click [Recover] to save them.

Part 3: What is Formatting?

In an operating system, file information is under management of the file system. The file system organizes the space of the storage device as well as protects and retrieves the stored files. Specifically, the file system can build, store, read, write and transfer files. It can also revoke files when they are not used.

Building file system is commonly known as formatting, or high-level formatting. Formatting is a way to initialize the partitions. That will delete all files stored in partitions.

Part 4: What is Low-level Formatting?

Low-formatting means erasing all data on the drive and factory resetting the drive. You can complete the operations on DOS, Windows and Linux, and even write commands to format the drive. You should remember that low-level formatting is a lossy way to erase all data, including the protected data. It is not suggested that you use this way if necessary.

If low-level formatting is completed in the internal or external drive, the control chip will be refreshed, including the capacity information, the manufacturer, the inner storage algorithm, the storage block and the numbers of the sectors.

Part 5: What is Different between Low-level Formatting and High-level Formatting?

1. High-level formatting is related to the operating system and completed by the system. Low-level formatting is a way to refresh the control chip that should be finished by the professional software.

2. Low-level formatting is to initialize the whole drive while high-level formatting can target at single partition.

3. After low-level formatting, data will be irrecoverable. Yet, high-level formatting is a recoverable process. If the data erased in the quick or whole format cannot be recovered, the data will be recovered after high-level formatting.

For example, if error always generate from your hard drive, even unable to connect with the operating system, you need to perform low-level formatting. Besides, if some parameters (i.e. hard drive interval coefficient) are attacked by virus, you also need to perform low-level formatting to reset the values.