Now that we've got a little theory under our belts, how can we actually partition a disk and format a file system in Windows? Although a quick web search will turn up all kinds of third party disk partitioning programs other people have written, Windows actually ships with a great native of tool called the Disk Management Utility. Like most things in Windows, there are a few ways to get to disk management. We'll launch it by right clicking this PC, selecting the "Manage" option then clicking the "Disk Management" console underneath the storage grouping. We should see a display of both the disks and disk partitions along with information about what type of file system they're formatted with. There are all kinds of good things to know here too. Like the free and total capacity of disks and partitions. One super-cool property of the disk management console is that from here, you can also make modifications to the disk and partitions on your computer. Messing with the partition or the Windows operating system is installed probably isn't the best way to demonstrate the partitioning and formatting abilities of the disk management console. So let's use a USB drive instead. Once the drive has been inserted and the plug and play service does the work of installing the driver for it, you should see it show up in the disk management as an additional disk. The USB drive is currently formatted using the FAT32 file system. Let's go ahead and reformat partition using NTFS instead. To do this, we right click on the partition and choose format. From this window, we can choose the volume label or name we'd like to give the disk. Let's just stick with USB drive. You can also specify the file system which will change to NTFS. That's pretty straightforward, but there are also some other options that might not be so clear. Like what's that allocation unit size thing? Well, the allocation unit size is the block size that will be used when you format the partition in NTFS. In other words, this is the size of the chunks that the partition will be chopped into. Data that needs to be saved will spread out across those chunks. This means that if you store lots of small files, you'll waste less space with small block sizes. If you store large files, larger block sizes will mean you'll need to read less blocks to assemble the file. We'll pick the default, which is fine in most cases. You'll also see the option to perform a quick format is available. The difference between a quick format and a full format is that in a full format, Windows will do a little extra work to scan the disk or USB drive in our case, for errors or bad sectors. This extra work will make the formatting process a little longer, so we'll just stick to quick for now. We're on our own, we don't want anything to slow us down. The last option on the format screen is whether or not to enable file or folder compression. The decision to enable or disable compression comes with a trade-off. If you enable compression, your files and folders will take up less space on the disk, but compressed files will need to be expanded when you open them, which means the computer's processor will need to do some extra work. We aren't particularly concerned with squeezing out every last bit of disk space, so we'll leave this box unchecked. Finally, we can hit "okay" to proceed with the format. Windows will warn us first that formatting the volume will erase any data that might be on it. Once we let it know that it's okay it'll start the formatting process. After a little bit of processing, we should see the label on the partition turn to healthy. Using the GUI is pretty intuitive, but there's also a command line way to accomplish the same task. This can come in handy if you need to automate disk partitioning. To do disk manipulation from the CLI we'll dive into a tool called Diskpart. Diskpart is a terminal based tool built for managing disks right from the command line. Let's format our thumb drive again but using Diskpart instead of the GUI. First of we'll plug in our thumb drive, then to launch Diskpart all we need to do is open up a command prompt, in this case command.exe and type Diskpart into it. This will open up another terminal window where the prompt should read Diskpart. You can list the current discs on the system by typing "list disk". Next, we identify the disk we want to format. A good signal is the size of the disk, which will be much smaller for a USB drive. Then we can select it with select disk and then disk one, now we'll wipe the disk using the "Clean command" which will remove any and all partition or volume formatting from the disk. With the disk wiped, we now need to create a partition in it. This can be done with the create partition primary command, which will create a blank partition for our file system. Then let's select the partition with select partition one. That's the number of our freshly created partition and now we'll mark it as active by simply typing active. If you guess that the next step is to format the disk with the NTFS file system, you're right? We can do this by running this command at the Diskpart prompt format FS for file system NTFS and the the label. I'm just going to call it "my thumb drive". And then the formatting type, we'll want to make it quick. This command will format the thumb drive with NTFS in quick mode, which we talked about earlier and we just gave it the name "My thumb drive". Congratulations, you've just formatted a USB drive from the command line. If you want to learn more about the options and tasks you can accomplish with Diskpart, check out the Diskpart link in the supplementary reading I've included right after this video. And there you have it, that's how you format a disk with the NTFS file system in the Windows operating system using both the command line and the GUI. If you want a refresher, feel free to watch this lesson again before heading to the next one.
