At the command prompt, type the following command: format e: (change the e: drive letter to the drive letter you are formatting).

The recovery process should exit and return you to the command prompt.On the next screen, select the Command Prompt option.Select the operating system you want to repair and click Next.Select the Use recovery tools that can help fix problems starting Windows option. After a few moments, a System Recovery Options screen should appear.Click Next to proceed through the recovery process. Once the computer has finished booting to the disc, a Recovery Options box should appear.How to boot from a CD or DVD in a computer.How to enter and exit the BIOS or CMOS setup.In your BIOS setup, configure the boot sequence, so the CD or DVD drive is listed first. If you do not see the message Press any key, the computer's boot sequence is likely not set to boot from the CD or DVD drive first. Using the following format method lets you erase the primary hard drive on the computer (e.g., the C: drive). If you have a Windows recovery disc or a Windows installation disc, you can access the DOS command prompt and erase a hard drive. See our format command page for further information and other options available with this command.The more times you format the drive with the count option, the more securely the hard drive is erased. After the first round of zero-fill formatting, the format process fills every sector with a random number between zero and nine. Replace the count text with the number of times you want the hard drive to be formatted. The command above tells Windows to format the hard drive (in this case, the E: drive) by writing zeroes to every sector. To zero-fill a hard drive, use the following command at the Windows command prompt. Zero filling makes it impossible for someone to recover data from the hard drive that was overwritten. The zero-fill format option is only available in Windows Vista and later.įor a more thorough erasing of data on a storage drive or device, you can zero fill it, overwriting all data on the hard drive with zeroes.

How to format my hard drive using cmd