Formatting your hard drive is an important step in setting up your computer. It clears all the data off the disk so that you can start fresh. DiskPart is a powerful command-line tool that allows you ...

Formatting a hard drive along with the install of a new OS is the best option. The vast majority of operating system installations provide a "format" option as part of the installation process.

Emily Long is a freelance writer based in Salt Lake City. After graduating from Duke University, she spent several years reporting on the federal workforce for Government Executive, a publication of ...

You may need to format a hard drive to match your computer's operating system before you can use it. To format a hard drive in Windows, you'll use the Disk Management utility; on a Mac, you'll use ...

As you probably know, formatting a hard drive doesn't completely erase the data on it. You must overwrite the data to securely destroy it, preferably multiple times. Windows 8 let's you do this with ...

Formatting your hard drive is very useful. It’s good for clearing everything off a secondary drive or when installing a new copy of Windows. Formatting is also good for cleaning up storage issues, ...

Ubuntu can format hard drive partitions with the FAT16 file system, used by older operating systems such as Microsoft DOS and Windows 95. Some older devices may also require a hard drive partition ...

Apple's computers are available with a generous amount of hard drive space, from 256 GB all the way to 8 TB on high-end models. While that may be plenty of space for most users, video editing, ...

USB flash drives (a.k.a. “thumb” drives) may seem passé in a world where AirDrop and cloud storage solve the file-transfer problem. But they’re still quite useful for handing over files to another ...