Have you ever encountered such situation where your player cannot play the video you download from other place? Have you ever receive a message that says the format of a certain file is not correct or your computer does not support this kind of file system? Can you make the situation clear and do you really understand the message? Do you know what is the format of a file and how to format a file even a partition?

About Formatting Partition

Formatting partition is also called formatting volume; these two terms are often used interchangeably. Formatting is actually the act of creating a file system on a volume (you could also use this function to change the file system among NTFS and FAT 32, FAT), so that the operating system can store and retrieve data on that volume/partition. NTFS file system has lots of advantages over FAT and FAT32 file system (such as file and folder permission, encryption and file compression), but sometimes we still have to change from NTFS file system to FAT32 file system because FAT32 has a better compatibility than NTFS and some applications only support FAT32, such as XBOX360, PS3 and some players. Format a partition will also do help to quickly delete all data on the partition and re-arrange a partition as it is empty.NTFS - New Technology File System: a file system for formatting computer hard disks in order that they can save information.FAT - File Allocation Table:A file system used by MS-DOS and other Windows operating system to organize and manage files. Also, it is a data structure that Windows creates when you format a partition by using FAT or FAT32 file system. Windows saves information about each file in the file allocation table for it can retrieve the file later.

Before You Do

• Before formatting a hard drive partition, you'd better back up all the important files and data that you want to keep (Formatting will destroy all data, take special care when performing the operation). The free backup software - AOMEI Backupper Standard could help you create a backup for those data.

• If AOMEI Partition Assistant recognize there is any program running on the drive which you are trying to perform, you will receive a notice from Partition Assistant to urge you to close that program.

• To ensure the operating system works properly, AOMEI Partition Assistant will not allow you to format system partition and boot partition. However, if you do need to format system partition or boot partition, you need to create a bootable media with AOMEI Partition Assistant first, after that, you can format these partitions by entering Bootable Media. In this situation, you should reset the start order of your computer from the original location to the bootable media you created. To do this, sometimes, you need to change the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) settings of your PC.

To Format Partition

Step 1: Launch Partition Assistant, in the main console, right-click the partition you want to format (Let's take G partition for an example), and then select "Format Partition". 

Step 2: In the pop-up window, you could reset the partition label, file system, and the cluster size (smaller cluster size makes less wasting of disk space, and we usually recommend you use the default size if you don’t know which one is better). Click "OK" to confirm the changes.

Step 3: You can see the changes in the main window and click "Apply" to execute the operation.

Notes:

• The formatting process will take some time, so please allow your computer to finish this task before using it for anything else.

• Formatting doesn't erase the data once and for all and anyone can successfully recover data from a formatted partition with commercial software. If you want to erase all data to prevent data from recovering with the help of related softwares (partition assistant can do this with its Partition Recovery Wizard), we suggest you to use the “Wipe Partition”.

• For setting Cluster Size, the smaller of the cluster size may let your partition generates many file fragments during the process of the data read-write and the bigger cluster may waste less disk space, so we suggest you use this default cluster size.

• If you need to store some big files greater than 4GB to the partition, we suggest you to use NTFS to format due to the 4GB limitation of FAT32.

• More easily, you can go to Step 2 above directly by clicking Format Partition in Partition Operations column on the left, but Format Partition is available only when one existing partition is selected. Since an unallocated space has no file system, you can think it is not a partition. So if you select an unallocated space, you cannot see Format Partition feature. Click Format Partition after choosing a partition, you will go to the second step stated above. and the rest steps are same.