How To Format USB Drive from Command Line

Formatting a USB Drive can be pretty straightforward. You plug in the USB drive and find it Windows File Explorer, and right-click > Format. While do this via GUI is simple and easy, if you want to repeat this for several USBs or automate this action, you probably want to do that via the command line to run as a batch script.

Today we will go over how to format USB drive via the command line.

Type “DISKPART” and Hit Enter, from the diskpart prompt, type “list disk” and hit enter. This should give you something look like below.

Microsoft DiskPart version 10.0.21364.1

Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: AMDRYZEN3

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online         3726 GB      0 B        *
  Disk 1    Online          931 GB      0 B
  Disk 2    Online          232 GB      0 B        *
  Disk 3    Online           14 GB  3072 KB
  Disk 4    Online           14 GB      0 B

DISKPART>

1. Select disk x (x represents your USB drive)*

For the example here my disk is #4, it should look something like below.

DISKPART> select disk 4

Disk 4 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART>

2. Clean > Enter

3. Create partition primary > Enter

4. Active > Enter

5. Format fs=ntfs > Enter

6. Exit > Enter

It should look something like below. Note here I chose to format in NTFS you may use format such as FAT32 etc.

DISKPART> Clean

DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.

DISKPART> Create partition primary

DiskPart succeeded in creating the specified partition.

DISKPART> active

DiskPart marked the current partition as active.

DISKPART> format fs=ntfs

   90 percent completed

This is the walk through on how to format USB drive via command line.

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