Top 4 Windows 11 Disk Format Tools

How to format a disk on Windows 11?

“I just bought a new SSD on Amazon and I haven’t installed it to my Windows 11 PC. I know before everything goes normal, I have to format the new SSD hard drive. However, I don’t have a good knowledge of computing and thus, I don’t know where I can find any Windows 11 disk format tool. Can anyone give me any advice?

Why format disk on Windows 11?

To answer this question, you should first know what disk formatting is. Generally speaking, disk formatting is the process of preparing a data storage device such as a HDD, SSD, floppy disk or USB stick for initial use. By formatting a disk, not only will all data on the disk be lost, but also, a file system like NTFS and FAT32 will be allocated to the disk. People usually format a disk on Windows 11 for following purposes.

1. When you install a new HDD or SSD to your PC, you’ll be asked to initialize the hard drive, partition, and format it before it can be used for data storage.

2. When a hard drive becomes read-only due to corrupted file system, you can’t add any data to it. In this case, formatting the disk should be the best workaround to remove write-protection.

3. If the disk is infected with virus or malware, formatting it can possibly eliminate them and make the disk normal again.

4. If the current file system is not compatible with your device or Windows 11, you can reformat it to another file system.

5. When your disk is nearly full, formatting can always help free up enough space for your PC.                                                         

4 Windows 11 disk format tools you may need

Since formatting a hard drive on Windows 11 brings so many benefits, how to do it? This is not something you should worry about since there’re 4 common ways out there to format disk on Windows 11. The first 3 tools are all Windows 11 built-in ones while the last tool is a free third-party software utility.

Note: Since all data will be erased from the target disk after a formatting process, you’d better take a backup first.

Option 1. Disk Management

Disk Management is the most common program utility Windows users take to perform various operations to manage disks including disk formatting, volume shrinking, and volume expansion.

1. On the desktop, right-click on “This PC” and select “Manage”.

2. Select “Disk Management” under the “Storage” tab.

3. Right-click on the target volume and select “Format”.

4. Then, select a desired file system and hit “OK”.

Option 2. File Explorer

File Explorer, also referred to as Windows Explorer, is a file browser existing in every version of Microsoft Windows since Windows 95. It’s used to navigate and manage your drives, folders, and files on your PC. Of course, it also contains the feature of Windows 11 disk formatting.

1. Right-click on “This PC” and select “Open”.

2. Right-click on the target disk and select “Format”.

3. Select a file system you want and click on “Start”.

Option 3. Command Prompt

Command Prompt, also called cmd, is a command line interpreter application. It’s available in most Windows OS and it can execute different commands you entered to perform advanced administration functions and fix some Windows errors. This tool is only recommended for professional users and computing expert due to its very complexity. Read on, and you’ll learn to format disks on Windows 11 with this unique tool.

1. In the search box on the lower left of the desktop, type “cmd” and select “Run as administrator”.

2. In the popup Command Prompt window, type “diskpart” and hit “ENTER” to the diskpart.exe tool.

3. Then, input the following command.

list disk: show all hard disks on your PC.

select disk #: select the disk where the target partition is.

list partition: all partitions on the disk will appear.

select partition #: the target partition will be selected.

Format fs=fat32 quick: the partition you selected will be formatted into FAT32.

Now, the disk formatting process is completed.

Limits of Windows built-in program utilities
1) If the disk is over 32GB, then, it can’t be formatted into FAT32.
2) An internal hard drive can’t be formatted into exFAT.
3) A drive that becomes RAW or write-protected and whose file system is corrupted can’t be formatted successfully

Option 4. Free third-party software utility

As you can see above, those 3 Windows 11 native disk formatters have more or less some limits you can’t avoid and thus, they don’t usually work quite well. If you fail in formatting a disk on Windows 11 with any of them, you might as well turn to another much more powerful third-party software utility - AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard – for help. By using it, you can format any sort of partitions into any file system you want in only a few clicks. Apart from its disk format feature, this tools also allows you to commit operations including disk initialization and hard drive wiping.

What’s the best disk format tool for Windows 11? Try the impressive and user-friendly disk manager for free!

Step 1. Install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. Right-click on the partition you want to format and select “Format Partition”. 

Step 2. Select a file system. Here, we take NTFS for example. Then, hit “OK”

Step 3. Hit “Apply” on the upper left of the main interface to start the disk formatting process.

Wait several minutes at most before it’s done.

Bonus: Need to format hard drive to FAT32?

Sometimes, people tend to convert NTFS to FAT32 or FAT32 to NTFS by formatting. However, in this way, data on the disk will be all deleted. In this case, AOMEI Partition Assistant provides a NTFS to FAT32 converter to help directly make a conversion between these 2 file systems without formatting the target disk and data loss.

Conclusion

Is there any reliable Windows 11 disk format tool out there? After going through the post, you have gotten the answer. Up to 4 tools are introduced and you can select any of them based on your own requirements. As for me, since the disk I want to format is over 32GB and I don’t want to risk losing data, so I decide to use AOMEI Partition Assistant instead of shrinking it. It worked well on me, pretty fast and pretty reliable. By the way, if you want to try other features including SSD secure erase and quick partition, you should upgrade to the Pro edition.