The way I see it, the external enclosure is nothing but a carrier which allows me to connect hard drives using USB. Is this true? do I have to format my HDD before using it in an enclosure? To be honest, it doesn't make sense at all. Select the drive you want to format (internal or external) by right-clicking and choosing Format. When the box opens, type in diskmgmt.msc and then click OK. I even found this discussion where, if I'm not mistaken, the same is said: Start up your computer as usual, but hold down the WINDOWS key and type in R to open the Run dialog box. Now, some people say there is a need to format the Hard drive first. I'm 95% sure the HDD is okay, and since I have valuable data on it, I want to buy an external enclosure and connect it to a new laptop. When asked what you want to erase, select Remove everything. A quick format doesn’t delete the data but instead erases only the pointers to the files.My laptop died, and it contained an HDD I later extracted from it. In Windows 10, open Settings > Update & security > Recovery, and then click the Get Started button. Yes, but don’t use this method if you want the data to be permanently erased. Then, follow the Windows Disk Management method below since the disk won’t be visible in Windows Explorer. Step 1 Set the boot drive in BIOS as explained above, then reboot your computer from the installation media. Unplug the drive you want to format and connect it to a different SATA port on your motherboard which isn’t part of the RAID controller.

Go into the RAID controller’s BIOS (look for a message during PC boot up) and look for an option to format the drive(s) or reconfigure the RAID as individual disks (this will erase them all).

Enter the diskpart command to launch the Disk Partitioning.

Use a software utility which came with your RAID controller or motherboard. If you are not able to boot your system in an ideal way, then you can format it via BIOS instead.

Before you use any of them, make sure you back up any files you want to keep.

If you have two or more disks configured as a RAID, there are various ways to format these drives. /rebates/2fen2fsignal2fhow-to-format-hard-drive&. It will treat the USB as another drive so to avoid inadvertently wiping that as well, remove it after you’ve booted into DBAN. Your PC should automatically boot the DBAN software, which will guide you through the process of erasing your hard drive, with options for different levels of data-wiping.

How to format my hard drive