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Notice we have only one USB flash drive plugged in. You might want to unplug other flash drives and removable media to avoid confusion. Right click your USB flash drive and select format from the resulting dialog box. Once you have File Explorer opened you will see on the right hand side a list of devices and locations. Step 2: Right click your drive and select format Once open, locate your USB flash drive, or external hard drive, you would like to format, in our case it is drive D: Open File Explorer either by clicking on the file folder icon on your taskbar or with the keyboard shortcut combination Win + E. In the File System drop down, select the exFAT.In the left pane right click the name of your USB drive.Insert your USB flash drive into your computer (obviously).Here is a brief summary of the steps necessary to format a flash drive on Windows 10, or any other windows version back to Windows XP. So before doing so, back up your import files! Warning: Formatting anything will erase all the data contained on that drive. It also does not have a 4GB max file size like some other file systems do. We recommend exFAT because of its ability to work on almost any system including Apple OS X, Linux, and obviously Windows. We are going to be formatting our USB flash drive using the exFAT file system, however, this guide will work for any file system you choose.
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While this guide is specifically for Windows 10, it will work for all versions of Windows from XP and up. The same thing is true when it comes to formatting a flash drive on Windows or any removable media like an external hard drive. Windows, in general, is an extremely user friendly operating system.
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