That opens up the built-in Computer Management utility.
To fix the drive right-click This PC in Windows 8.x or 10, or the Computer icon in Windows 7 and select Manage. When you see that the drive is not recognized, and you try to format it, I got the “Windows was unable to complete the format” error. Windows was unable to complete the format If you have a drive that does have data, you’ll want to try a different troubleshooting method as this will wipe any data from it.
Note: In this scenario, I am using a drive that has no data on it. After that, no matter what version of Windows I tried to use the drive on, I kept getting these errors indicating the drive wasn’t getting recognized.
The other day I was trying to install Windows 8.1 with Microsoft’s Media Creation Tool, and the install failed on my new 64GB flash drive.
