How to format any drive in Windows 8.1 with ReFS

Windows 8 (or rather Windows Server 2012) introduced a new file system called ReFS. ReFS stands for Resilient File System. Codenamed "Protogon", it improves on NTFS in some respects, while also removing a number of features. You may read about the advantages of ReFS in the following Wikipedia article. ReFS is intended for file servers only. In Windows 8.1, it is in fact locked for server OS only. If you need to unlock and enable full read and write support for ReFS in Windows 8.1, you can follow these simple instructions in this article.

To enable support for ReFS,

1. Open your registry editor (see how)
2. Navigate to the following registry key:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control

   Tip: you can access the desired Registry key with one click.
3. Create here a new key called MiniNT to get the following path:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MiniNT

4. Here, you should create a new DWORD value called "AllowRefsFormatOverNonmirrorVolume". The value data of this parameter must be 0 or 1. Set it to 1 to unlock the ReFS feature in Windows 8.1. 
   
5. Reboot your PC.

That's it. Now you will now be able to write to ReFS partitions, format new partitions in ReFS and so on.