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Windows Diskpart

The basics to disk and partition management with diskpart

Diskpart is a command line tool that doesn’t have as many restrictions as disk manager. It is still limited when working on the C: drive, and not a good tool for partition manipulation. To alter the C: drive, run it from run from the windows installer or from the windows PE.

This guide will walk you through wiping a disk and creating a single empty partition using the entire drive.

If you would like to only erase a disk refer to the diskpart clean factoid however, this will not securely erase your data, see the wiping disks article to do that.

  1. To open DiskPart, you will need an elevated command prompt. Just type diskpart and DiskPart will load.

  2. To identify your disk, type list disk, then type select disk X where X is the disk number. (Choosing the wrong disk will cause data loss)

    ListDisk.webp

  3. To wipe all partitions from your disk, type clean

  4. For disk type and partition structure, most cases will want basic and GPT. If this disk needs to be read on older systems, use MBR instead of GPT. Run convert basic or convert gpt based on what you need.

  5. To create the raw partition, run create primary partition. If you picked MBR, run active after creating the partition.

  6. Run detail disk and list partition to ensure that your disk looks correct and you have both the partition and volume selected. You should have a star next to the volume and partition.

    If either the partition or volume is missing, type exit, reconnect your drive and start over.

    If the partition or volume isn’t selected (you can tell by the star on the right), type select partition X or select volume X.

    Detail-PreFormat.webp

  7. To format the partition, type format fs=<filesystem>. For what file system to use, reference the following:

    To add a label at this stage, add label=<label> to your command.

    If you are using NTFS and want to enable file compression, add compress to your format command.

    To significantly speed up the format time, add quick.

    A full format command will look something like format fs=fat32 label=Drive quick. This will do a quick format with a label of “Drive” and file system of FAT32.

  8. To assign a drive letter to the new partition, run assign letter=X where X is the letter you choose.

  9. Type exit to close DiskPart. Your drive is formatted.