Emily Long is a freelance writer based in Salt Lake City. After graduating from Duke University, she spent several years reporting on the federal workforce for Government Executive, a publication of ...

Whether you're looking to reinstall Windows, retire one of your company's computers, or just prepare a second hard drive for reuse, it's a good idea to wipe the drive first by formatting it. You can ...

You may need to format a hard drive to match your computer's operating system before you can use it. To format a hard drive in Windows, you'll use the Disk Management utility; on a Mac, you'll use ...

“Format” as a word in computers is very popular, and a well-known word among computer users. We all have done that, especially with USB drives. That said, what people are sometimes afraid of is when ...

Most external hard drives come formatted with the FAT file system, which makes the drive compatible with multiple operating systems. As such, the drive is immediately usable out of the box. If you ...

Formatting your hard drive is very useful. It’s good for clearing everything off a secondary drive or when installing a new copy of Windows. Formatting is also good for cleaning up storage issues, ...