Good day to you!
It’s extremely easy to format a flash drive in any operating system of the Windows family, and there are almost no differences in this procedure in the system’s various versions. I will use Windows 10 in my example, but there are practically no differences from Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 18.
How to format a flash drive:
1. Insert a flash drive in any USB connector on your computer. A USB connector looks like this:
In my case, the flash drive has already been inserted and shines (is on). In modern PCs, it doesn’t matter, which connector to use to insert a flash drive (2.0 or 3.0 that you can see on the picture).
2. Press “Start” button and select “File Exprorer”. (In Windows XP the button looks a bit different, but it is located in the bottom left corner of the screen). In Windows XP, “My Computer” name is used for this button instead of “Computer”.
3. In the opened window find the flash drive you are going to format:
4. Click the flash drive with the right mouse button and select “Format…”
5. You will see the menu of “Format” program, let’s discuss it in detail.
Out of all settings, we are interested just in the two – File system and Volume label. The volume label is the name of the flash drive. If you don’t like the current name, you can give it any name you like; you can use both Latin and Cyrillic characters. If you are going to use the flash drive not only on PCs, it’s better to use the Latin alphabet, because some players fail to read Cyrillic characters and will return an error. File system – if the flash drive will be used for transmitting information between computers only – then, select NTFS. For the purpose of compatibility with various players (in a TV set or a car), it’s preferable to choose FAT32.
You can remove the check mark “Quick format” in case your flash drive failed to format correctly on the first try or something operates wrong after the quick format.
6. Click “Start” button and wait until the process has been finished:
That’s it! You flash drive has been formatted and work-ready!
If something went wrong or there are questions left – just ask! I always will be glad to help you! Good luck! :)