'Format Did Not Complete Successfully' Error Message

Ever tried to format a hard drive, solid state drive, USB flash drive or SD card, only to be confronted with a message saying “The format did not complete successfully”? This is an incredibly common error, but can occur in many situations. If you want to prevent someone from undertaking flash or USB data recovery, formatting and overwriting is crucial

The first possibility is that the error message is causes by a virus. Unknown viruses may stop you formatting your removable disk. Therefore, the first thing you should do is have a go at running antivirus software to identify any, and remove them. When this is done, you can have another go at formatting the storage media.

Bad sectors are one of the most common factors that can lead to you getting this error message. If you’ve ruled out the possibility of a virus, the next thing you should do is check whether the disk or SD card has any bad sectors. In this case, you can go to the start menu and type “chkdsk” to find this built-in tool. You can also use third-party software like MiniTool Partition Wizard to scan for bad sectors. If the scan finds that there are indeed bad sectors, you need to repair them. If there are no bad sectors, you need to try and format the drive with Command Prompt.  Press Win+R, and then type CMD and click Enter. Find the letter associated with your device, and type "FORMAT [Drive letter:]/FS:FAT32 /Q /V:PenDrive, inserting the drive letter, then press enter.

The final solution to take if your drive isn’t formatting and none of the above is solving your problem is to use a third party tool to format it instead. We recommend using either MiniTool Partition Wizard or AOMEI Partition Assistant. When you’ve launched MiniTool, right click the drive you want to format and choose ‘Format’ or ‘Format Partition’. Confirm the partition label, file system and cluster size, and click ‘Apply’ to perform all the changes.

usb data recovery