Just hit the Enter key again.įormat cannot run because the volume is in use by another process.

It will prompt you to enter a new disk for Drive I.

Type CMD in the Run Prompt, and hit enter to open the Command Prompt.

Make sure no copy process is in progress, and the drive is not open in the explorer.

If you use an incorrect drive letter, you will end up formating another partition and lose all the data. Identify the exact drive name of the USB drive. Plug in the USB drive you want to format, and open File Explorer. You can also use PowerShell instead of CMD. When using the Diskpart tool, you will need admin privileges. One is using a simple format command while the other is using Diskpart. When using the Command Prompt, you have two methods. However, if you want to format a USB pen drive using the Command Prompt, here is how you can do it in Windows 11/10/8/7.

All you need to do is right-click on the drive, and select Format. Now your USB drive or SD card is ready to be used again.For an end-user, formatting the USB drive is easy. Create a new partition with create partition primary and then mark it as active.įinally, we can format the disk with format fs=Fat32 quick. Once you have selected your disk, use clean to remove all existing partitions. Select the disk by using the command select disk X where X is the number of your disk from the previous command. You will want to be 100% sure of your selection here because the following commands will wipe ALL DATA from whichever disk you select. You can usually identify it based on the sizes listed. Now determine which of these is your Linux disk. This will open the Diskpart command line application in a new window.įrom here, start by using list disk to show all of the disks connected to the PC. Start by launching a command prompt or Powershell session, then run the command diskpart. Here is a super quick way to format a Linux USB drive or SD card on a Windows PC using Diskpart so that it can be repurposed.

You may have noticed that if you connect a disk with Linux partitions to your Windows box, that you cannot view all of the files or the size of the drive seems to be reported incorrectly. Format a Linux USB or SD Card Using Windows

Format quick diskpart