How to Format SSD with OS on It

Can’t format SSD with OS on it

Search on the Internet, you may find many questions on the forums like the example below:

“I want to format my SSD that has Windows 7 installed. Will it still keep my operating system after formatting? I have already back up important things, but do I need to do anything else? Like I’m doing it to delete some space off it and then download what I want again.”

If you use Windows built-in tool to format the SSD with OS installed, you will get the error message “You cannot format this volume”. Because if there is an operating system on the SSD, your computer needs to boot via this SSD. Without the operating system, your computer will not start. That’s why you can’t format it in Windows directly.

Bootable format tool for SSD: Format SSD with OS on it

Cause the Windows built-in tool does not help on format SSD with Windows operating system installed, what should we do if we need formatting our c drive? You may be puzzled about how to format SSD with OS on it? Don’t be worry! You can turn to a third party SSD format tool to do this operation. Compare with other software, here I highly recommend AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional – the best SSD format tool which provides you many powerful features like formatting partition and making bootable media. You can use it to create bootable media in advance and then format the SSD in your need easily and effectively. Now,  download the tool and see how to use it to format SSD with OS on it. 

Note: Back up important files on the SSD before formatting the SSD with OS on it as the operation will erase all data on it.

Step 1. Connect a USB drive to the computer.  Install, and run it.  Click "Make Bootable Media" on the top panel and then click "Next" in the pop-up window.

Step 2. Choose "USB Boot Device" and click "Proceed".

Step 3. Wait patiently for the process to complete. Then, you'll have a bootable USB drive that contains the pre-installed AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. 

After creating bootable media successfully via AOMEI Partition Assistant, you should enter BIOS while rebooting to boot the computer from the bootable USB drive.

After that, you will be in the main interface of AOMEI Partition Assistant. Do as the following specific steps below:

Step 1. Right-click the SSD partition you want to format and select “Format Partition”.

Step 2. And then choose the file system of the partition on SSD you need in the pop-up window.

Step 3. After that, it will be back to the main interface, preview the changes and click “Apply” > ”Proceed” to complete this formatting operation.

Conclusion

Follow these simple steps, you can easily and effectively format SSD with OS on it. AOMEI Partition Assistant can be the best SSD formatting tool. It can help you to create bootable media and format partition easily.

Besides formatting partition and make bootable media, it also has many other powerful functions. Such as convert system disk between MBR and GPT without losing data, NTFS to FAT32 converter, rebuild MBR, migrate OS to SSD, convert dynamic disk to basic and so on.