Follow the steps in this article to partition and format an internal hard disc drive.

To partition and format a hard drive using Windows 10, you will use the Disk Management utility and follow the steps below to partition and format the hard drive:

1. Right click on lower left corner of the Start screen and click Disk Management.

2. A new window will show all the drives detected by windows. The drive that needs to be partitioned and formatted may show a solid black bar signifying unallocated space.

Note: If the drive shows a blue bar, it means that the drive is already formatted and may contain data. Be sure to back up all your data. If you want to repartition and reformat the drive, right-click on the blue bar and click Delete Volume. The bar color will be displayed in black.

3. Right- click on the unallocated space or the black bar and click on New Simple Volume.

4. The New Simple Volume Wizard screen will appear. Click Next to continue.

5. Select the volume size. The volume size will automatically default to the maximum disk space and it is the recommended volume size. Click Next to continue.

Note: You can create multiple partitions by assigning a specific volume size in megabytes (MB) for the first partition and then continuing to the next step. You will notice the remaining space will be displayed as unallocated space (as shown in Step 4). You will need to create another New Simple Volume in the remaining unallocated space for the next partition.

6. Assign a drive letter to represent the new volume created, the system will default to the next available letter. Click Next to continue.

7. The File System screen controls how to data is read and written. Set the file system to NTFS (NTFS is the default Windows file system), set Allocation unit size to Default. If you wish, you can assign a name to the volume in the Volume Label field, (the default name is New Volume). Check the box labeled Perform a quick format and click Next to continue.

8. Now click Finish to begin formatting the drive.

9. The listing for the drive (Disk 1 in the picture below) will display “Formatting” as it formats the drive. This process may take a few seconds.

10. When the drive is done (Disk 1 in the picture below), the bar will be blue and the drive will display Healthy.