How to solve ‘Windows was unable to complete the format’ ?

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How to solve ‘Windows was unable to complete the format’ problem?

‘Windows was unable to complete the format’ problem can be caused by virus infection, bad sectors, storage device damage, disk write protection, etc.

Ways to solve this problem:

1. With Windows disk Management

When you get ‘Windows was unable to complete the format’ error message, you can first try to fix this problem with Windows Disk Management tool. You need to perform the following steps:
Step 1: Right-click the “My Computer” icon on the desktop and hit the “Manage” option. Click on “Disk management” to open Windows Disk Management.

Step 2: Select the Micro SD card, USB or flash drive that you need to format, right-click and hit “Format”. If there are any partitions on the drive, you should delete them all at first.

2. Format with Command Prompt

Disk Management is not almighty and might not be helpful in many cases. Thus it is better to switch to command line based formatting solution. Follow the following steps :-

Step 1: For Windows 7 users, click to Start button and type ‘cmd’ in the search both and press enter. If UAC is enabled, you need to find Command prompt from start menu and run it as administrator.

Step 2: Type command ‘diskpart’ on the black windows and press Enter key. Then you can see partition and disk list of current computer. All drives are listed with numbers and Disk 4 is the flash drive in question.

Step 3: Continue typing ‘Disk 4’ which is the problem drive and clean and press Enter. The drive will be scanned and its damaged file structure will be erased during scanning. Once the process is done, it repots confirmation message telling that it has successfully cleaned the drive and Partition needs to be created.

Step 4: Type ‘Create Primary Partition’ and hit enter. Next type in command prompt ‘format/ FS: FAT32J:’ and Press Enter. Here J is the drive letter of the USB drive, and you can change it in line with specific cases.

3. With EaseUS Partition tool

If still there shows the problem then apply the following methods.
Steps for this method include:
Step 1: Insert the SD card, USB, hard drive or some other device you want to format, launch EaseUS partition tool, right-click the device and choose “Format partition”.

Step 2: A mini window pops out, on which you can edit the partition label and choose a file system.