Question: I have an internal hard drive that I use as storage where I dump the stuff I need backed up. I want to format it to exFAT instead of NTFS so that it doesn’t have to deal with permissions. The problem is, it only appears to be available to format as NTFS. Is there a way to force it to be formatted as exFAT?

Answer:

  • By Command prompt Format D: /A:64K /FS:ExFAT
  • 64k is cluster size, D is target drive letter.

  • By Diskpart:

    list disk

  • select disk ‘#’ (where # is the number of the targer drive)

    If you want that for a partition:

    list partselect part # (where # is the number of the partition)format fs=exfat -q

    If you want it for the whole drive just erase it all and make a single partition

    cleancreate partition primary

    active (you many not need to make it active, so you can skip this)

    format fs=exfat -qUpdate: for Windows 10, use QUICK instead of -q