Fix “windows was unable to complete the format” Error in Windows 7/8/10

You were using your Pen drive or memory card normally and one day suddenly an error comes saying,”windows was unable to complete the format“, and you might worry if your pendrive is safe or not. We at live for tech have come today with fix of this error you can use to format your sd card or usb stick. In addition to above error you might be getting errors like windows cannot format this drive, failed to format the device or the format did not complete successfully, use our methods to format disk in windows 10. Read the whole post to format your usb drive successfully.

Reasons For “Windows unable to format” Error

Possible reasons for this error you maybe getting while formatting your USb stick, sd card or any other storage media can be from one of the below :

Disk may be write protected

Some disks are write protected and hence you can not modify or delete data any data inside it. This may be one of the scenarios when you are not able to format the disk.

Memory card/ SD card infected by malware or virus

There is a chance that your usb pendrive or sd card is infected by virus. To overcome this, scan your drive with good antivirus to make sure there is no virus in the usb stick or sd card. If there is any malware, it can be removed by using malware bytes software.

Disk is physically damaged/corrupted

This might be one of the reason that your disk may be physically damaged or it may be corrupted, in this case it can not be recovered unless repaired. If this is the case, you have to forget this sd card or pendrive and buy a new one.

Also read : Windows 10 blue screen error solution

Fix For “windows was unable to complete the format”

So, as you know all about the error and reasons for which it might have occured, below are some methods through which you can fix your error and format the pendrive or sd card successfully.

Method 1 : Format through windows disk management

Follow the below steps to fix unable to format disk in windows.

• Right click on “My computer” or ‘This PC‘.
• Click on Manage.
• Now go to “Disk management“. Alternatively, you can go to disk management by typing DISKMGMT.MSC in run.
• Now find the drive which is your usb stick or sd card you want to format and right click on it.
• Now select format.
• Select File system as FAT32 or Ex-FAT.
• Click on OK.
• That’s it, your pendrive or sd card is ready to use.

Method 2 : Use command prompt to format sd card or usb drive

If the above method didn’t work for you then try this method to format via command line.

• Go to run.
• write cmd and press enter.
• A new command prompt window will open.
• Type format d:/fs:ntfs (d: is the drive letter of partition that you want to format) and press “Enter”.
• It may take some time.

That’s it, we hope that you have formatted your usb drive or sd card by now and it may be working now. We hope you liked this post, Share this post on social media to make people aware of this solution so that they can fix their usb drive too. This method works for failed to format the device and the format did not complete successfully errors too. If you have any doubts or problems, you can post them in comments below.