July 5, 2008

How to format a USB Flash Drive to NTFS file system?

As you know NTFS is a high-performance and self-healing file system proprietary to Windows XP / Vista / 2003 / 2000 & NT, which supports file-level security, compression and auditing. It also supports large volumes and powerful storage solution such as RAID.
The most important feature of NTFS is the ability to encrypt files and folders to protect your sensitive data.
To enable NTFS on your USB Flash Drive follow the steps
  • Right click My Computer and select Manage.
  • Open the Device Manager and find your USB drive under the Disk Drives heading.
  • Right click the drive and select Properties.
  • Choose Policies tab and select the "Optimize for performance" option.
  • Click OK.
  • Open My Computer.
  • Select Format on the flash drive.
  • Choose NTFS in the File System dropdown box.
  • Device Formatting is completed.
To remove a device safely without data loss use a "safely remove hardware" procedure or Eject function from Windows Explorer.[via - ntfs]

6 comments:

  1. Why are you bothering with FORMAT? No need to FORMAT. Just open a DOS (Command Prompt) window, give (e.g. if your USB is volume F: and has label "my_volume"):

    CONVERT F: my_volume /FS:NTFS

    and that's it!
    Simple, quick, safe and always working!

    ReplyDelete
  2. How, if In my USB flash drives have no NTFS option?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Can you explain to me step by step

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks for the reminder about convert. That fixed my problem. No I can use all 16GB of my flash drive.

    ReplyDelete
  5. thank you very much!
    good explanation

    ReplyDelete
  6. good explanation
    it work good!
    thank you

    ReplyDelete