Reformat a USB Drive

9. December 2008 by David Peterson.

Every once in a while you will need to reformat your USB drive. The reason is the files may have gotten corrupted.

On hard drives the corruption could come from scratches on the disk itself. Maybe the unit was bumped while it was shutting down. Regardless of how the scratch got there your data in that section of the disk is probably gone.

On solid state devices like USB Flash Memory there are no moving parts but your data can still get corrupted. Put this device next to a magnet or remove it from the USB port without shutting it down properly and you can get a small electrical shock that will ruin the data.

 You know you have a problem when you insert the USB device into port and your information is missing or you can’t open the device.

Try this…

 Reformat the device by inserting it into the USB port.

 Go to “My Computer” (Vista users - just go to “Computer”) and select the drive by left clicking on it.

 Once you have selected the drive, right click on it and choose “format.” If you don’t see “format” there then go up to the top left hand corner and left click on the “file” navigational tab. You will see “format” in that spot.

 A small popup will occur that will look like this picture….

The capacity will be filled in, the file system should be left at FAT 32 (File Allocation Table - a standard format for post Window 95 operating systems), the Allocation unit size should be left at ”default.”

Also deselect the “Quick Format.” By doing this the  entire disk  is formatted.

Then hit start. Depending on the size of the drive this could take seconds, minutes, or longer.

That’s it - Oh yea, don’t forget to back up your data if you can. You are not really erasing data here you are just formatting the drive. With that being said once you reformat you may not be able to recover your existing data.

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