Windows 11/12 – Re-formatting a USB Stick to FAT32 using Diskpart (For your car MP3 player)

1. Open CMD as Administrator and run ‘diskpart’ command.

C:\Windows\System32>diskpart

Microsoft DiskPart version 10.0.22621.2

Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: mypc-12345

2. Run ‘list disk’ command to confirm your disk/usb.

DISKPART> list disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
——– ————- ——- ——- — —
Disk 0 Online 498 GB 2048 KB *
Disk 1 Online 29 GB 1024 KB

3. Select your target disk, in my case I am formating 32 GB USB drive, which is disk 1. Run ‘select disk 1’.

DISKPART> select disk 1

Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

4. Run ‘clean’ to clean the selected disk.

DISKPART> clean

DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.

5. Create a new primary partition by running ‘create partition primary’.

DISKPART> create partition primary

DiskPart succeeded in creating the specified partition.

6. Select your new primary partition by running ‘select partition 1’.

DISKPART> select partition 1

Partition 1 is now the selected partition.

7. Activate your partition by running the ‘active’ command.

DISKPART> active

DiskPart marked the current partition as active.

8. Now format the file system (fs) to your desired format. In my case, I am using this USB to store music for my car and my car only supports FAT32 format (old). So, I run ‘format fs=fat32’. If you want other formats, then change ‘fat32’ to any one of the following formats, ‘FAT’, ‘exFAT’, ‘NTFS’, ‘UDF’, ‘ReFS‘.

DISKPART> format fs=fat32

100 percent completed

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For a quick Diskpart format reference, click on this link.

https://ss64.com/nt/diskpart-format.html

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