From the course: Help Yourself: Tech Tips Weekly

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Formatting and reformatting media

Formatting and reformatting media

From the course: Help Yourself: Tech Tips Weekly

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Formatting and reformatting media

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- [Instructor] Media you obtain for your computer comes pre-formatted. As I attach an external drive you see it mounted into the system. It's media is available instantly because it's been formatted, prepared with a file system for use by Windows for storing files. Formatting is required only when first preparing media for use to completely remove all files and reinitialize the media, or to apply a file system format compatible with other operating systems. These last two items are examples of reformatting which is always destructive to any data already on the media. Press the Windows E keyboard shortcut to view a file Explorer window. Navigate to the This PC part of the window. This screen shows available storage devices and on this PC drive D is a thumb drive. And as you can see by this graph the media does contain some data. Right click the icon and choose a format. Most of these options are fine as is. One…

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