How To Delete Windows Partition

As you probably know, in club to be able to store files on a hard drive, it needs to be prepared first: it needs to exist initialized, partitioned, and formatted just the right fashion. If you've bought an external bulldoze in a store, the preparation has probably been already done by the bulldoze manufacturer. However, what if you lot want the bulldoze to be prepared differently? For example, you lot may want to re-format the drive, or alter the partitions that it has. The way to practice such tasks in Windows is to utilize the Disk Management tool that comes preinstalled with Windows.

It'south easy to open Deejay Direction, merely the procedure is slightly different in different versions of Windows. If you accept Windows vii, run Windows Explorer, right-click on Computer, choose Manage from the menu, then select Disk Management nether Storage. If y'all have a newer version of Windows, correct-click on the Start Menu, and choose Disk Management from the menu displayed:

Before you continue, first things first: Disk Management is a very powerful tool, and with dandy power comes great responsibility! If you are non very experienced with computers, you can wait, only better not bear on and let someone more knowledgeable to exercise the job. Because with Disk Management it'south very piece of cake to destroy your partitions and lose your files, if you don't know what you are doing.

The about important matter when using the Deejay Management tool is to make sure you tin identify the disk you desire to manage in the list. Usually you can practise information technology by the total size of the disk displayed, although it may be confusing. For example, in this example, a difficult bulldoze that's described every bit a 240 GB drive by the manufacturer, is shown to have merely 223.56 GB by Windows. (Patently, the disk manufacturers and Windows have a unlike agreement of what a "gigabyte" is.) Likewise, if you lot have several disks of the same size attached, it may get even more confusing. If in doubt, improve unplug all external drives except for the one you actually want to work with, to make certain you are not accidentally erasing data on a incorrect disk!

In our case, the 240 GB deejay (shown as 223.56 GB deejay in the listing) is Disk three (allow's recall this number, we volition need it a scrap subsequently.) Information technology has two partitions, one is a 128MB EFI partition that has no bulldoze letter assigned, and another NTFS partition of the size 223.43 GB, that has the label test and the drive alphabetic character 1000:. Although these two partitions looks similar, they are treated very differently by Windows. If you correct-click on the normal NTFS segmentation, you should meet the normal card that lets you perform diverse tasks on that partition, including the Delete Volume command:

However, if we right-click on the first EFI partition, the bill of fare we get is completely disabled:

As you can meet, the system partition is protected in such a way that even the powerful Disk Management tool cannot do anything to it. Note that it's non considering the partition is EFI, it'due south considering the tool that created that partition had marked it in a way that prohibits other tools to tamper with information technology. Even so, what if nosotros want to delete the EFI system partition and re-initialize the disk from scratch?

While the Disk Management tool is helpless in this situation, fortunately Windows offers another tool, DISKPART, that can do things to the disks that Disk Management can't. The catchy part is, that DISKPART is a command-line tool, that requires us to blazon commands into its command prompt to make it practise what we want.

The process of getting to the DISKPART tool is slightly different in dissimilar versions of Windows. Starting time, you need to open up Windows command prompt in the "administrator" mode. In the recent versions of Windows you can simply correct-click on the Start button and cull one of the control offered:

• Windows Final (Admin)
• Power Crush (Admin)
• Control Prompt (Admin)

If you have an older version of Windows such as Windows 7, y'all can open the command prompt in the ambassador mode every bit follows: click the Start button and enter cmd in the search box; brand sure that cmd is highlighted on the menu displayed, simply practice not press the Enter key still; instead, press the Ctrl and Shift keys together, and while keeping them depressed, press Enter. The Ctrl+Shift combination should force the command prompt to open in the "administrator" mode.

When the control prompt window opens, start the DISKPART tool by entering the diskpart command into the command prompt window:

This should display the DISKPART command prompt. The first command nosotros should use is list disk that should brandish the listing of the disks currently continued to the computer:

Again, it'south very important to properly identify the disk we want to piece of work with in the list. Our 240 GB disk is nevertheless listed as Deejay 3 with the capacity 223 GB. (Notice that information technology is listed as having 0B gratis. This is because all available disk space is currently allocated for the two partitions we've discussed in a higher place.) Once we are sure that this is the disk nosotros desire to re-initialize, we need to select it, by entering the command select deejay 3 (yes, that's how selection is unremarkably done when using the command line tools!). Then, allow's utilize the listing disk command again, to confirm that the disk in question is indeed now selected:

After double-checking that Disk 3 is now selected (information technology should have the star character * in front of its label), it's time to finally issue the command that will erase everything on the disk iii, including the protected sectionalization. The control that does that is clean. Note that this control erases everything on the selected disk, all partitions, protected or not. If you notwithstanding have files on other partitions of disk three that you desire to keep, you lot should exit now and backup those files, considering after using the clean command all such files will exist erased without a trace!

After the clean command is done (it should take no more than a few seconds), we go a fresh deejay with all partitions erased. We can go out the DISKPART control prompt (by typing exit into its command line), and become back to the Deejay Management tool (run across above how to open it.) When information technology starts, it automatically detects the presence of the clean disk and prompts united states of america to initialize it:

Press OK and the newly cleaned deejay will appear in the list. The difference is, the protected EFI partition is gone! (The normal NTFS partition that used to exist on the disk 3, is gone, besides.) The disk is at present ready for you to get-go creating partitions, formatting them, and practise other things as needed:

Annotation that if you are trying to erase the system deejay that hosts the C: bulldoze where Windows itself is installed and running, so even the powerful DISKPART command tin't work: Windows but refuses to erase the drive from which it is running. To erase such a disk, yous need to physically remove information technology from the reckoner, attach it to another computer as an external drive, and then use DISKPART on that computer to erase the disk.

Happy disk managing!

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