How to Format a 16GB Pen Drive
Pen drives are among the most convenient forms of data storage. A 16 GB pen drive holds the equivalent of more than three recordable DVDs, fits in any pocket and works with any modern computer without device drivers. Pen drives allow you to take all of your most important data anywhere. If you have a pen drive that you want to empty of all data quickly and you'd like to minimize the chance of the old data being recovered, you can use the Windows "format" function to format it as if it were a hard drive.
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Instructions
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1
Insert the pen drive into an open USB port on your computer. If your pen drive has an activity light, you should see the light turn on when Windows detects the drive.
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2
Click on the "Start" menu and select "Computer." You should see an icon representing the pen drive listed under the "Devices with Removable Storage" heading. Windows 7 displays the capacity of the drive below its icon; a 16 GB pen drive should have a usable capacity of slightly less than 16 GB. Confirm that you've identified the correct icon before continuing.
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Right-click the icon for the pen drive and select "Format." A new window labeled "Format Removable Disk" appears. Confirm once again that the capacity displayed at the top of the window is correct.
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Select "FAT," "FAT32" or "NTFS" using the "File System" drop-down menu. The NTFS file system allows you to store files larger than 2 GB on the drive. However, you cannot read an NTFS-formatted pen drive on other operating systems such as Linux and Mac OS X.
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Remove the check mark from the "Quick Format" box at the bottom of the window to perform a full format operation on the pen drive and reduce the possibility of the data being recovered.
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Click the "Start" button and then click "OK" to confirm that you want to erase all of the data on the pen drive.
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Click "OK" when the message "Format Complete" appears. Click "Close" to return to Windows.
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