How to Reformat PS4 Hard Drive for PC Use in Windows 10, 8, 7? (2024)

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The Scenario

About a week ago, my 500GB PS4 hard drive is filled up, and there is no space to store more games. So, I bought a larger HDD to replace the old PS4 hard drive. After replacement is complete, I want to format the old PS4 hard drive as a secondary storage device in my Windows 10 computer, but it fails. The used PS4 hard drive cannot show up in Windows Explorer, and the only option I have is to "Convert to Dynamic Disk" in Disk Management. How to reformat PS4 hard diskfor PC usage? Please help.

Why reformatPS4 Hard Drivefor PC?

As the successor of PS3, a home video game console, the PlayStation 4(PS4) owns better hardware settingsand usually comes with a 500GB capacity. With time goes by, the PS4 hard drive will be filled up quickly because of the large games and files. Thus, you can replace the PS4 hard disk with a new, larger, speedier one.If everything goes well on the new PS4 disk, what can you do with the old PS4 hard drive? For most users, they may want to use the old PS4 hard drive as an internal or external storage device for Windows PC to expand the storage space.

However, it is easy to use the old PS4 hard drive on PC as expected and many users find the Windows won’t recognize this hard drive, so they come to online forums and ask for help (like the users in the first part “Scenario”). Therefore, it is necessary to reformat the PS4 or PS3 hard drive to a proper file system that can be recognized by Windows operating system.

How to Reformat PS4 Hard Driveon PC?

When the PS4 hard drive isn't readable by Windows and itisnotinvisible in Windows Explorer, you can try the third-party disk formatting tool to reformat this drive. Here we would like to recommend you tryAOMEI Partition Assistant Standard.This freewarecan help you format the PS4 hard drive for PC in Windows 10/8/7 with no hasslevia its powerful and flexible formatting feature.Next comes the step-by-step guide for your reference.

Step 1: Place PS4 hard drive into a USB external hard drive enclosure, then connect it to a computer via USB connection.

Step 2. Download, install and launch the AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. Right-click the partition on PS4 hard drive and select "Format Partition".

Step 3.A window pops up, change “File System” with the right one, and the “Partition Label”. Then click “OK” to continue. File System includes FAT32, NTFS, Ext2, and Ext3.

Tip:All the data on PS4 hard disk will be destroyed.

Step 4.Preview the “Pending Operations”, and press “Apply” to reformat PS4 hard drive for Windows PC.

Compared with formatting function in Windows Disk Management, AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard can format a large hard drive (more than 32GB) to FAT32 file system, such as formatting 2TB drive to FAT32.

Summary

So, this is how to reformat PS4 hard drive for PC usage via a free partition manager. If you just want to sell or donate the PS4 hard drive after disk replacement, you can use the “Wipe Hard Drive”feature to permanently erase data on the disk so that the next owner cannot recover them for abuse. To enjoy more advanced features like secure erasing SSD, clone MBR disk to GPT, convert dynamic disk to basic without deleting volumes, etc, please upgrade to Professional.

Emily is an English editor of AOMEI Technology; she has a great passion for providing easy solutions for people to tackle with all disk or partition management problems. In addition to writing articles about disk/partition management, she also edits great tutorials on how to back up and restore disk for data security.In her spare time, she loves to learn computer skill to improve herself or stay with her family to enjoy a good day.