Formatting is a valuable and essential tool when dealing with any type of storage disk and can help to solve a lot of errors and headaches. But what do you do if your USB flash drive needs to be formatted but, every time you try through the property menus it comes up with an error, or won’t even recognise the drive properly at all. Don’t despair because here is something you can do.

Formatting an unformatable Pendrive  is a common process that may need to be undertaken quite frequently, but unless you have gone through this procedure before it can be a mine field. The last thing you want is to finish the process and end up with an unusable pendrive . Here is a quick step by step guide to Format an unformatable Pendrive

This guide formats your flash drive as FAT32, to format as NTFS simply substitute the term in the command box. FAT32 is the recommended formatting style by this guide but many do prefer NTFS. Follow the Below steps to Format an unformatable Pendrive.

Step 1. Turn on computer as normal

Please note: if you know the letters associated with your disk locations or can use a utility such as disk part to list this information then skip steps 3 and 4

Step 3. Go into my computer (accessible from the start menu or desktop) and look down the navigation panel on the left hand side, this lists down to the popular and root menu folders and locations on your computer.

Step 4. Your Pendrive should be listed in one of these locations, it may be referred to by brand, as portable storage or something similar. Next to this label will be a letter,

for example “G: removable storage device ” if the device does not show up you may need to test the port to find the letter with another USB device. This letter needs to be written down or remembered in order to complete this process.

Step 5. Go to the windows start menu, click start or the Windows symbol depending on your edition of Windows, then click run.

Step 6. Type cmd into the run dialog box and click OK, this is to start  the command prompt window from which you will be able to choose your format style and name your drive.

Step 7. Then the command prompt window is opened and you will need to type “ Format G: “ 

if you want to Format it as FAT32  then type “ Format G: /FS: FAT32 ”

Step 8. The G in this instance refers to our example Pendrive location, instead you would enter the letter that you remembered or wrote down from the my computer side panel
After you have typed the above command press enter.

Step 9. Here, you will be asked to press enter again and then to give a name for your drive. Follow these prompts then click on enter again.