Windows 10: USB stick appropriate format for Windows

Greetings everyone. I couldn't find a better community to ask my question.

I have two USB sticks (8 & 32 GB) and I forgot which format they came in when I purchased them. Recently I used both to get a Windows installation using the Media Creation Tool. Now I want to format them for daily use on my Windows machine and maybe add BitLocker encryption.

Which format should I go with? FAT32 OR NTFS?

(The Windows format window suggests FAT32 is the default format)

Thank you in advance for your support!

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:)

 

Installing windows off of a USB stick

Step By Step from vista:
From admin cmd prompt

1. diskpart
1a. list disk
2. select disk 1 (replace 1 with your usb drive)
3. clean
4. create partition primary
5. select partition 1 (replace 1 with your usb drive)
6. active
7. format fs=fat32
8. assign
9. exit

Copy Windows Vista's DVD ROM content to the Flash Drive

xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\ (d being your vista cd and e being your usb stick)

And that's it, boot off your usb disk

 

Chkdsk shows errors after formatting the usb stick

In order to reproduce the problem, I am doing the following steps:

• I put a text file with a single line of text on the usb file.
• I plug in a USB stick to a PC and in the explorer window I go to the usb stick drive.
• I double-click on the text file and open it in notepad.
• I close the notepad.
• I the explorer I go to the one level up and I click the right button on the USB drive and choose the properties->format.
• I formatted the disk with default proposed parameters (FAT32).

The disk is empty after formatting. At the command line prompt window, I type the chkdsk and the letter of the USB drive and I am receiving information that errors have been found (Convert lost chains to files (y/n)?).

I checked it with various usb sticks and different systems (Windows 7, 8, 10) and I got the same results.

***Post moved by the moderator to the appropriate forum category.***

 

Formatting a USB Stick

Hi Richard, yes formatting the stick will delete the files . . .

Try that USB Stick in another (preferably non Windows 10) PC and see if the Stick reads.

If it does, copy the files form the stick, format it and copy the files back onto the stick.