When exchanging a PS4 hard drive or formatting a common external hard drive to be used as an extended device on the console, it is often not recognized in Windows after that. But then, does the device become a paperweight? Here’s how to format PS4 hd on your PC and solve this problem.
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How to format PS4 HD on PC
The type of formatting that the Playstation 4 uses ends up making the storage device used on the device recognized on the PC as a storage device, but without the possibility of accessing the content or even recording information, so it is necessary to format it to a standard that is recognized by Windows if you want to reuse the hard drive for another purpose.
To revert the “paperweight” status that your external hard drive can meet is slightly simple and we will see that in this tutorial.
Important: When you remove an internal HD from the PS4, it does not have a case. Therefore, the easiest way to do this is to place the PS4 HD in a case of any external HD you have and connect it via USB ports. If you have a PC and have enough knowledge, you can connect the HD via cables on your PC board, but the tutorial here is using the method via USB connection which is simpler.
Step by step:
- Connect the HD to the PC.
- On Windows: Go to “Disk Management”.
- The HD must appear as Disk 1 (It can also appear with the information “Unallocated” or “Unknown”.
- Right-click it and choose “Format Disk”.
- Then click with the left button.
- Select “New Volume”.
- Then “Create New Volume”.
- Define a letter for the HD.
- Define the format to be used in the formatting.
- Format the disc.
Normally your computer’s hard disk appears as “Disk 0”, but always be aware of the information regarding the disks, so as not to end up formatting your computer’s hard drive by accident.
It is possible for the PS4 HD to appear on the PC with multiple partitions. If this happens, just delete the partitions with the option “delete volume” before formatting the disk.
Remembering that if you want to keep any information contained on that disk, it is necessary to backup it on another device, because after formatting everything that is saved on the HD will be deleted.
If you are going to use the disk to make large file transfers between Windows platforms, it is recommended to format the disk in the formats: NTFS or exFAT. You can understand a little more about the formatting differences in this article: What is the difference between NTFS, FAT32 and exFAT?
The process is quick and after formatting you can use the device removed from the PS4 as a regular external hard drive.
I hope the tutorial helped and that you now have one more device to store your files.