Providing the external hard drive is attached to the pc.
go to my computer, to find the drive letter of the hard drive. ie drive (E)
go to start, run, and type in cmd
a black DOS screen will appear.
from here you enter
format
it will say all data on this drive will be lost
do you wish to continue Y or N
hit Y, and the drive will be formatted.
Once complete it will ask for a drive name or press enter to continue.
Hope this helps
be safe
formats are not drive specific so it depends on the software with windows open a command prompt and use the format command
In the same way how you access local disks, you just need to know an external drive name.
You might need to reformat the flash drive. You can either do this in the GUI or in the command prompt.
Defrag
Not unless you reformat the drive, although if the drive is a different format like a mac and you have a PC you might have to reformat the drive just to use it
to access your flash drive you should be able to open my computer and then listed with the drives should be your flash drive you can just right click and then go to open. However, if this does not work do the following to convert to FAT or NTFS: To convert a volume to NTFS or FAT from the command prompt Open the Command Prompt window. In the command prompt window, type convert drive_letter: /fs:ntfs For example, typing convert D: /fs:ntfs would format drive D: with the ntfs format. Notes To open a command prompt, click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Command Prompt. You can convert FAT or FAT32 volumes to NTFS with this command.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/165159/install_windows_7_from_an_external_hard_drive.html
deltree D:\
dont knw
in command prompt you would type H:/.
with the PROMPT command type "prompt text", text being what you want it to say. now, instead of displaying the drive path, it will display what you entered as the text.
depends on the OS, but for most it is : defrag <DRIVE> example: defrag c: