Reformatting an old boot drive - can't delete partitions?

[Sir Beregond]

Maybe I am just getting rusty since the last time I did desktop support was in 2014, but anyway here's the problem.

 

I forgot that my Crucial 1TB 2.5" SSD was a W10 boot drive prior, so now using it as a storage drive in my new W11 box, I see where I can delete the main partition, but not where I can delete the others that Windows always makes. I feel like I am missing something obvious here. I can delete and reformat E: all I want, but can't seem to do anything with the recovery or EFI partition. I want it to just be one big disk like Disk 2. Disk 1 on here is my main m.2 drive with W11 installed on it. I don't need the Crucial drive to be a boot disk anymore.

 

Edited June 14, 2022 by Sir Beregond

[Cerberus]

try something with a little more horsepower, like acronis

[Sir Beregond]

17 minutes ago, Cerberus said:

try something with a little more horsepower, like acronis

Do I have to buy it?

[Cerberus]

i'm pretty sure when i tried it out, the free trial did everything i asked of it

[Sir Beregond]

11 minutes ago, Cerberus said:

i'm pretty sure when i tried it out, the free trial did everything i asked of it

Will check that out then, thank you for the suggestion.

[The Pook]

CMD as admin -> diskpart -> list disk -> select disk <disk number> -> clean all

[Sir Beregond]

15 minutes ago, The Pook said:

CMD as admin -> diskpart -> list disk -> select disk <disk number> -> clean all

Exactly what I needed, thanks Pook.

 

[RelevantWing]

Is use MiniTool Partition Wizard free to remove stubborn partitions. 

 

I dock a lot of drives from oem systems to wipe them and some of the oem partitions are stubborn. Never had an issue using Minitool

[schuck6566]

I use EaseUS Partion Master Free edition, lets me delete and format drives and sections along with renaming ect.  See my 3 drives I'm using at the moment.

Disk 0 = 2Tb HDD for testing software,Music,Vids,and non Steam games(epic,GoG,ect)

Disk 1 = 1Tb NVMe with the Win 10 OS and other junk related to it(recovery ect)

Disk 2 = 3Tb USB 3/7200 RPM HDD with Steam games and some other Windows junk like Pics ect.

 

You can see each drive in the screen shot included.

[LordXeb]

On 13/06/2022 at 21:56, The Pook said:

CMD as admin -> diskpart -> list disk -> select disk <disk number> -> clean all

Pretty much the defacto way to do it. If that doesn't work there are bigger issues. Also, good to see ya around pook!!!!

[Sir Beregond]

10 hours ago, LordXeb said:

Pretty much the defacto way to do it. If that doesn't work there are bigger issues. Also, good to see ya around pook!!!!

Yeah worked perfectly. I used to remember all that stuff but its been like 9 years since I've done desktop support. It seems I forgot a lot of the basics I used to do a lot, like cleaning disk partitions. 

[VoidTheWarranty]

On 09/02/2023 at 09:42, Sir Beregond said:

Yeah worked perfectly. I used to remember all that stuff but its been like 9 years since I've done desktop support. It seems I forgot a lot of the basics I used to do a lot, like cleaning disk partitions. 

This will also get rid of the stupid unallocated space if you try removing the 16MB (Microsoft Reserved partition) that was left over from a previous windows install during a fresh windows installation. For me the windows installer wasn't letting me remove it and I didn't want to have a fresh install with 2 separate 16MB partitions one of which just empty so I took a shot and brought up the CMD box during the windows install process and: Diskpart > Select disk 0 > Clean.

No more temporary insanity. I have always hated when partitions don't do what they should even if it's 16mb... It's just there and it bugs me.