How to Successfully Format Hard Drive from USB

Key Takeaways:

• When your operating system is not booting properly or the disk is not working properly, you need to create a bootable USB to format the hard disk.
• AOMEI will introduce two USB format tools to format the drive: including the Windows built-in tool -CMD and a third-party tool - AOMEI Partition Assistant.

Can you format a hard drive from USB?

Of course, you can format a hard drive from USB on Windows 10/11. For any reason, if you want to format hard drive from USB, you are on the right page. You don’t need to be tech-savvy to do this. You can format a hard drive from USB using a bootable USB drive created by a third-party HDD formatting tool or a Windows installation disk.

Here, we recommend you free AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. It supports to create a bootable USB based on Windows Pre-installation Environment, then you can boot computer from USB to load an operating system and run AOMEI Partition Assistant to format hard drive or to do other modify job for hard drive.

format hard drive from USB with Bootable format Tool

To format hard drive from USB without any issue, you should download AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional on the PC first. Then, refer to the following page to perform 2 parts. You can also wipe a hard drive including OS in this way.

▶ Part 1. Create a bootable USB

Before creating a bootable USB, you need to prepare a USB and backup it in advance if there is important data.

Step 1. On the main interface, click “Make Bootable Media” under “Tools” column and click “Next” to continue.

Tip: It will automatically detect whether your system has installed Windows AIK or not. If yes, go to Step 2. If not, please download and install Windows AIK first.

Step 2. In the pop out window, choose “USB Boot Device” to create bootable USB.

Step 3. Read the information and click "Yes".

Step 4. The progress of creating WinPE bootable USB drive will take a few minutes.

After that, you need to restart the PC, enter BIOS and change boot order to make the PC boot from USB drive.

▶ Part 2. Format hard drive from bootable USB

When you boot from bootable USB, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional will be launched automatically.

Step1. Right-click the partition on hard drive, and select “Format Partition”.

Step 2. Choose any file system as you wish and click “OK”.

Step 3. You can review the result, and don’t forget to click “Apply”.

Format HDD from USB using Command Prompt

If you don't want to use a third-party tool, Windows provides a built-in command prompt to help you format the drive from USB. But before you start, you need to create the Windows installation disk. This method is complicated to use, so please be clear about the command parameters in advance and be prepared to find the system partition.

Step 1: Create a Windows installation disk and boot your computer from it.

Step 2. Enter BIOS setup and set the Windows installation drive as the boot drive.

Step 3. After booting your computer from the installation media click Repair Your Computer > Troubleshooting > Command Prompt in the lower left corner.

Step 4. Type the following commands in the Command Prompt window in sequence and press Enter:

• list disk
• select disk + disk number
• create partion primary   
• format fs=ntfs

The method may be more complicated for beginners. But the method is suitable for formatting hard disk from BIOS using USB, if you are familiar with computer operation, you can try this method, otherwise, please use AOMEI Partition Assistant to format hard disk quickly. Using this tool you can also try more features to optimize and enhance the performance of your computer.

Conclusion

AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional is powerful enough to format hard drive from USB. In addition, there are other advanced features, such as, resize/merge/split/move/clone/delete partition, as well as convert between NTFS and FAT32, migrate OS to SSD, even create Windows 11 To Go USB, etc.