AOMEI Partition Assistant
How to Reformat PS4 Hard Drive for PC Use in Windows 10, 8, 7?
If you plan to reformat your old or usd PS4 hard drive to use it as an external drive on Windows 10, 8, 7 computer, check out this article and you will know how to reformat PS4 or PS3 hard drive for PC quickly and easily.
By Emily / Updated on May 12, 2023
The Scenario
About a week ago, my 500GB PS4 hard drive is filled up, and there is no space to store more games. So, I bought a larger HDD to replace the old PS4 hard drive. After replacement is complete, I want to format the old PS4 hard drive as a secondary storage device in my Windows 10 computer, but it fails. The used PS4 hard drive cannot show up in Windows Explorer, and the only option I have is to "Convert to Dynamic Disk" in Disk Management. How to reformat PS4 hard disk for PC usage? Please help.
Why reformat PS4 Hard Drive for PC?
As the successor of PS3, a home video game console, the PlayStation 4 (PS4) owns better hardware settings and usually comes with a 500GB capacity. With time goes by, the PS4 hard drive will be filled up quickly because of the large games and files. Thus, you can replace the PS4 hard disk with a new, larger, speedier one. If everything goes well on the new PS4 disk, what can you do with the old PS4 hard drive? For most users, they may want to use the old PS4 hard drive as an internal or external storage device for Windows PC to expand the storage space.
However, it is easy to use the old PS4 hard drive on PC as expected and many users find the Windows won’t recognize this hard drive, so they come to online forums and ask for help (like the users in the first part “Scenario”). Therefore, it is necessary to reformat the PS4 or PS3 hard drive to a proper file system that can be recognized by Windows operating system.
How to Reformat PS4 Hard Drive on PC?
When the PS4 hard drive isn't readable by Windows and it is not invisible in Windows Explorer, you can try the third-party disk formatting tool to reformat this drive. Here we would like to recommend you try AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. This freeware can help you format the PS4 hard drive for PC in Windows 10/8/7 with no hassle via its powerful and flexible formatting feature. Next comes the step-by-step guide for your reference.
Step 1: Place PS4 hard drive into a USB external hard drive enclosure, then connect it to a computer via USB connection.
Step 2. Download, install and launch the AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. Right-click the partition on PS4 hard drive and select "Format Partition".
Step 3. A window pops up, change “File System” with the right one, and the “Partition Label”. Then click “OK” to continue. File System includes FAT32, NTFS, Ext2, and Ext3.
Tip: All the data on PS4 hard disk will be destroyed.
Step 4. Preview the “Pending Operations”, and press “Apply” to reformat PS4 hard drive for Windows PC.
Compared with formatting function in Windows Disk Management, AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard can format a large hard drive (more than 32GB) to FAT32 file system, such as formatting 2TB drive to FAT32.
Summary
So, this is how to reformat PS4 hard drive for PC usage via a free partition manager. If you just want to sell or donate the PS4 hard drive after disk replacement, you can use the “Wipe Hard Drive” feature to permanently erase data on the disk so that the next owner cannot recover them for abuse. To enjoy more advanced features like secure erasing SSD, clone MBR disk to GPT, convert dynamic disk to basic without deleting volumes, etc, please upgrade to Professional.
