Today's tip shows how to format a USB flash drive with NTFS using Command Prompt and PowerShell commands.
Command Prompt
This example shows how to "quick format" a memory stick mounted on D: drive to NTFS. The /V parameter assigns a volume label of "NTFS-USB", and /A specifies the standard NTFS cluster size of 4096 bytes.
C:\> format D: /FS:NTFS /A:4096 /V:NTFS-USB /Q
These commands return the D drive's file system information and NTFS cluster size:
C:\>fsutil fsinfo volumeinfo D: | find /n "File System Name"
C:\>fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo D: | find /n "Bytes Per Cluster"
PowerShell
To perform same NTFS format operation in PowerShell, use this command:
PS C:\> Format-Volume -DriveLetter D -FileSystem NTFS -FORCE -NewFileSystemLabel NTFS-USB
You can use the same commands to return drive information and pipe output through select-string to filter data:
PS C:\> fsutil fsinfo volumeinfo D: | select-string "file system name"
PS C:\> fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo D: | select-string "bytes per cluster"
This story, "Windows 10 commands to format USB flash drives with NTFS" was originally published by ITworld.