 Hello, everybody! Sometimes when you try to connect a USB pen drive or an external hard disk to your computer, the operating system warns you that it should be formatted before we can use it properly. Let's explore the situation when there is some data on such a disk that should be saved, or if there is no important information on the hard disk or USB drive and formatting them is not a problem at all. Most of the time, when you see the notifications saying you need to format the disk in the drive before you can use it in Windows 10 and 11, it happens due to a file system error, which is caused by not removing a drive properly, interrupting a write operation or by some other factors. However, you may also see this notification in various situations. If this USB drive or hard disk is a new one, it may come without formatting at all, so it is your first duty to format them before using. If the drive you are trying to open has been previously formatted and used in Linux or macOS, and their file systems are not supporting Windows, this includes EXT-3, EXT-4 for Linux and HFS or HFS Plus or APFS for Mac drives. If a memory card was used as internal storage on Android, if the disk file system is shown as raw. By the way, in our channel, you can watch a very detailed video about raw disks and how to fix them. You can find the link in the description. Alright, so you have connected your USB drive, memory card, or an external hard disk to a desktop PC or laptop, and got the error. You need to format the disk in Drive before you can use it. What should you do? If you encounter this error with a disk, volume or USB drive that don't contain any important available data, or if you have copies of such important files elsewhere, another case is that the data on the disk is not important at all, so we can fix the disk or USB drive just by formatting them. You can do it in any way that you find convenient. By clicking the Format button when trying to open a disk, or by right clicking on it and selecting the Format option, or by using the Disk Management tool. When you do it, all data will be erased, but the disk will start working properly again. If Windows doesn't suggest formatting the disk when you try to open it, and you can't format it in any other way, you can fix the problem without keeping the files by using the Command Clean and the Disk Part tool. Launch the Command Prompt as Administrator, then enter the Command Disk Part, and then List Disk. Now we can see the list of all disks connected to this computer. In my case, I need to clean a USB pen drive. Be very careful when choosing the volume for this operation. After that, enter Select Disk. To clean the volume, type the command Clean and press Enter. After the process is complete, we can see a report saying that disk cleanup was successful. After that, type the command Create Partition to create a volume on this pen drive. To choose it, type Select Partition. Now we need to format the USB pen drive in the choosing file system. For example, NTFS. To do it, enter the command format FSNTFSQuick, that is, we perform quick drive format. Press Enter. Wait until the process is over. Then assign a letter for this pen drive, for example, M, with the help of this command. As you do that, close Disk Part with the command Exit. Close the Command Prompt. Go to the File Explorer, and now we can see that our pen drive is completely operable now. It's a much nestier situation when the drive that refused to open used to hold important data. Then you have not only to format it, but also to restore the partition containing the data. In this case, don't format the drive, as it will just erase all the information. Instead, do the following to have your files back. Launch the command Prompt as administrator, enter the command CheckDisk, RequiredDisk, and its letter. After checking the drive, the computer will repair the damaged sectors and your NTFS file system in this volume. Remember that this method is only good if the USB drive or hard disk were initially formatted in NTFS. Let's go back to the drive. As we can see, now it works properly. All the files it had before the failure are still there. If the drive used to have the FAT file system, you will see this error when trying to run the command CheckDisk. What if the command CheckDisk didn't work properly for some reason? All the raw drive used to have the FAT file system before. Despite of all that, your files from such drive can still be recovered, because in fact, they are not deleted yet. It's just a file system failure that makes them inaccessible. So how can you do that? Here is the disk and we can't access the data inside it. To restore this data, run Hetman Partition Recovery. You can find a link to download this program in the description. Select the disk which encounters this error. Click on the disk and select Full Analysis. After the scan is over, the program will detect and display all partitions. Click on the one you need and you will see the files stored there in the window on the right. If there are many files on this disk and you need to find and recover a particular one, click on the folder with the named content of our analysis. Our program has sorted the files into folders by their format. You can use the preview window if you want. To restore the files, drag the necessary items to the recover list and click Recovery. Select the method to save the files and specify the pass. Hit Recovery. And now the files have been recovered. And that is all for now. Hit the like button below to subscribe to our channel if this video helped you repair a disk or to recover data from there. Thank you for watching and good luck. While you are watching this video, civilians in Ukraine are dying from attacks in bombardments of the Russian Federation. The Soviet Union has attacked a peaceful country in the very heart of the world. Support the Ukrainian army by making a contribution to the font to come back alive. Use the QR code of the link below the video to transfer any amount of money that will boost Ukrainian resistance and help it counter Russia's designable invasion.