Can't format a flash drive or media card

[Greenie]

I am having a problem with Windows 10 formatting a drive. I get a message that says windows is unable to complete the format.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
Eddie

 

[Saltgrass]

It would really help if you were to explain what you are trying to do, but win 10 won't format any more than 32 GB for a FAT32 partition on a USB drive.

 

[Greenie]

I have a 16 GB flash drive that I am trying to clean all the data off. I go to file explorer, right click on the drive and then click on FORMAT. it tells me that formatting will erase everything on the drive, I click ok. The format box comes up, I click start and then a message comes up saying WINDOWS CANNOT COMPLETE THE FORMAT. I have tried several cards and flash drives with the same message

 

[Saltgrass]

You could check the drive with Disk Management to see if there were any special partitions on the drives, maybe a symbol like a lock.

If that did not help, you could try cleaning the drive first with Diskpart. Then format it the way you want.

Have the devices been used as any special drives such as recovery or install or ever been encrypted?

If you want to try Diskpart, open an admin command prompt. Start Diskpart, then get of list of drives and installed and select the drive number you want to clean.

Once selected you can type the remaining commands to format the drive or use Disk Management.

Diskpart
lis dis
sel dis 2 < this should be your USB drive so use correct number
clean < this will wipe the drive.
cre par pri
format quick fs=fat32 < use file system of your choice
assign <allows for drive letter
exit

 

[Greenie]

Thanks for the info, but the problem has to be with the computer because I was able to format all 3 of the drives on my wife's computer

 

[Grizzly]

it is possibly a problem with your card reader. Try an external card reader you have to plug in a USB port. My laptop has a bad reader and it shows the same message most of the time. in those cases I use an external reader which always worked so far for me.

 

[Norton]

That's strange! I think this is more than a coincidence.
Of late I have received the exact same message when attempting to format USB drives "WINDOWS CANNOT COMPLETE THE FORMAT" however, when I've clicked OK on the message and check the drives Windows has in fact formatted them.

Win 10 Pro 1803.17134.165

 

[clifford_cooley]

Try this utility.

USB Disk Storage Format Tool 5.0
https://www.neowin.net/news/usb-disk-storage-format-tool-50

Quickly and thoroughly format any USB flash drive with your choice of FAT, FAT32, exFAT, or NTFS partition types.
USB flash drives hold everything from personal information to music and pictures and even secure data, with the added advantage of being small and rugged enough for keychain duty. USB Disk Storage Format Tool utility allows you to quickly and thoroughly format virtually any USB flash drive with your choice of FAT, FAT32, exFAT, or NTFS partition types. Free USB Disk Storage Format Tool for Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows Server 2012/2008/2003.

Features:

• Quick format and safe format.
• Erase all data and delete space on flash drives that cannot be removed in the traditional way.
• Remove any tracks of malicious software that may have infected it.
• Correct partition errors if any.
• Create volume label for USB disk drives.
• Scan drive for errors before formatting.
• Create a FAT32 volume larger than 32 GB.
• The software has been tested with thousands of flash drives (Compact Flash, CF Card II, Memory Stick Duo Pro, SDHC, SDXC, Thumb Drive, Pen Drive) of the following brands, SanDisk, Kingston, Transcend, Corsair, HP, Sony, Lexar, Imation, Toshiba, PNY, ADATA, Verbatim, LaCie, Panda, Seatech, SDKSK9, Silicon Power, IronKey, and HDE.

 

[Greenie]

Thanks Clifford, took a long time to try format a drive and at about 30 minutes in said can not format disk. Now the drive shows it as corrupted. I'm at a loss

 

[Greenie]

I took the external hard drive and 2 16 gig flash drives that windows 10 said was corrupted to my wife's windows 7 computer and formatted them with no problems. I believe the problem has to be my windows 10 computer

 

[Rodney3]

I took the external hard drive and 2 16 gig flash drives that windows 10 said was corrupted to my wife's windows 7 computer and formatted them with no problems. I believe the problem has to be my windows 10 computer

Try to format using this freeware Rufus:
https://rufus.akeo.ie/

Let me know the result.

 

[Greenie]

Sorry no good. after it goes through cleaning-says drive is unreadable and corrupted.
I guess I'll just have to use my wife's when I need to format.
Thanks to everyone that tried to help