Disk Management Formatting Stuck Best Practice Solutions

Disk Management Formatting Stuck

Formatting is one of the most effective ways to resolve disk problems such as “external hard drive shows 0 bytes”, “you need to format the disk in drive X: before you can use it”, and “external hard drive taking forever to load”, etc. Disk Management is a practical utility for disk formatting. However, sometimes you may encounter the “formatting stuck in Disk Management” issue like the user described above:

“Hi, newbie here. just wanna ask something. I tried to reformat my internal HDD and then it is stuck on formatting in Disk Management. Should I cancel or not? Because it's been like this since I tried to format it. Thanks for the help.”forums.tomshardware.com

If Disk Management formatting gets stuck, you can proceed with the following solutions.

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Solution 1. Wait Patiently Until Formatting Is Completed

Sometimes, just because a disk takes a long time to format in Disk Management does not mean there is a problem with the formatting process. The disk formatting duration will be affected by factors such as disk storage capacity, formatting type, and interface connection type. Generally, the larger the disk capacity, or if you choose a full format instead of a quick format, the formatting duration may be very long, ranging from dozens of minutes to several hours.

For more information, you can refer to this article: How Long Does It Take to Format a Hard Drive? [500GB/1TB/2TB/4TB].

So, you may consider waiting patiently until the formatting process is completed. Or, you can try the next way.

Solution 2. Perform a Quick Format

If you don’t want to continue waiting for formatting to complete, you can choose to cancel the format first, and then perform a quick format.

Step 1. In Disk Management, right-click the partition being formatted, then choose the Cancel Format option from the context menu.

Step 2. Once the format is canceled, you can right-click the target drive and choose Format. In the new window, make sure the Perform a quick format option is selected. After that, specify a volume label and file system, then click the OK button.

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Solution 3. Format the Disk With Disk Management Alternatives

Apart from Disk Management, there are other partition formatting tools available. For example, you can format a disk by using CMD or MiniTool Partition Wizard.

1. Format a disk by using CMD:

Step 1. Press the Windows + R key combination to open Run. Then type diskpart in the text box and press Enter to continue.

Step 2. In the Command Prompt window, type the following command lines and press Enter after each command:

• list volume
• select volume * (* represents the volume number of the disk partition)
• format fs=ntfs quick (ntfs represents the files system, and you can choose another one based on your needs)

If there are multiple partitions on the disk, you can choose to delete all the partitions and format the whole disk by typing the following command lines.

• list disk
• select disk *
• clean
• create partition primary
• format fs=ntfs quick

2. Format a disk by using MiniTool Partition Wizard:

If diskpart format is stuck at 0 percent or CMD runs into some error, you can use MiniTool Partition Wizard to format the disk. It is professional and free partition magic that is designed to optimize partitions, such as formatting, extending/shrinking, moving, creating/deletion, etc.

Download it and start disk formatting.

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Step 1. Launch MiniTool Partition Wizard Free. On its home page, select the partition that needs to be formatted, then scroll down to choose the Format Partition option from the left panel.

Step 2. Set up the partition label, file system, and cluster size, then click the OK button.

Step 3. Finally, click the Apply button in the lower left corner.

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Verdict

To sum up, this post talks about why does it take so long to format the disk in Disk Management and what should you do if you encounter the issue of “Disk Management formatting stuck”. Hope you have benefited from this post.

Should you have any questions about MiniTool software, feel free to send an email to [email protected].