Emily Long is a freelance writer based in Salt Lake City. After graduating from Duke University, she spent several years reporting on the federal workforce for Government Executive, a publication of ...

You may need to format a hard drive to match your computer's operating system before you can use it. To format a hard drive in Windows, you'll use the Disk Management utility; on a Mac, you'll use ...

How do I format a hard drive? A computer hard drive stores your files, allowing you to access them at any time. The majority of the time, you want these files to remain stored properly and safely.