In the case of Windows, FAT32, NTFS, and exFAT are the relevant file systems.

Similarly, a file system is how the OS manages and names groups of data. In certain cases, such as when you need to install Windows 11 on the drive, GPT is actually a necessity as it’s a core requirement for Windows 11. We have an in-depth article on the differences between MBR and GPT, but the key takeaway for practical reasons is that GPT is recommended in most cases as it addresses and improves on many of MBR’s limitations. A hard drive is partitioned into blocks or sectors, and the layout of such partitions on the HDD depends on the partitioning scheme used. Let’s talk about the options you’ll need to specify when formatting a hard drive, starting with MBR and GPT. As such, we’ve included all such necessary details and listed the full steps to format a hard drive using CMD. However, for certain scenarios, such as when you need to convert a drive’s partitioning scheme, mark a partition as active, or simply format the boot drive, command line tools become necessary.Įven in a general context, the formatting process can be confusing if you’re unfamiliar with things like partitions, partitioning flavor, and filesystems. Generally, GUI components like File Explorer or Disk Management are easy-to-use and sufficient to format a hard drive in Windows.

Diskpart disk format