The method you’ll use depends on whether your drive is healthy or malfunctioning – but this might not be intuitively obvious if you aren’t familiar with formatting.īelow are all the possible situations or reasons that require you to perform a format. There are two methods to format your disk without losing data.

What Are the Reasons to Format Your Hard Drive? However, you will still need special software to restore your files, and there are a few more steps you need to do before and after formatting to completely secure your data.īut first, you need to determine the condition of your drive to find out which method is best for your situation. A quick format only marks your data to be overwritten by new files – it doesn’t immediately erase your data (by overwriting it with zeroes) as a full format does.Īs long as you use quick format, you can reformat a drive without losing files. A full format permanently deletes everything on the drive by writing zeroes all over your data. However, there are two types of formatting you can perform in this case: full format and quick format. If you want to change your external hard drive’s file system (or recreate one), you need to format it. Read on! Can you Reformat an (External) Hard Drive Without Losing Data? Below, we’ve provided detailed step-by-step instructions (with screenshots) for both healthy and malfunctioning drives. Yet in the case of a corrupted or infected drive, formatting might be your only option.įortunately, there are ways to format your hard drive without losing data, depending on the condition of your drive. You’ve probably found a lot of ways on the internet to format your hard drive – the only problem is that they all lead to data loss. Can I format the entire computer without losing data?.Can I reformat a hard drive without losing data on a Mac?.Is it really possible to recover data after the format?.Does formatting the hard drive delete everything permanently?.Step #3: Retrieve Your Data from Backup/Safe Place.Step #2: Format the Hard Drive Using a Preferable Method.How to Format a Healthy Hard Drive Without Losing Data.Step #3: Scan and Restore Newly Created Backup.How to Format a Malfunctioning Hard Drive Without Losing Data.What Are the Reasons to Format Your Hard Drive?.Can you Reformat an (External) Hard Drive Without Losing Data?.

How to format my hard drive on windows