How to delete partitions in windows 10 [best methods]

If you are looking for different ways to delete partitions in Windows 10 for your hard drives, here we will see how to do it in a few different ways. We will use all the ways that the Microsoft operating system gives us in order to leave our hard drive, pen drive or portable hard drive totally clean.

Index of contents

Obviously there are many ways to do this, in addition to the tools that are available in Windows. But if we have this operating system installed, it is not worth complicating our lives looking for applications that do practically the same as those that we already have for free.

On many occasions our hard drive is so saturated with information that the only thing we want is to directly delete everything to start again. It is also possible that we have been given a drive and it has been previously partitioned. In these or whatever your case, the solutions we show are perfectly applicable.

Delete partitions in Windows 10 graphically

We will start with the first way we have to do this directly from our graphical interface. The name of the application that is natively available in Windows is Hard Disk Manager. We already have several tutorials in which we cover many of the uses of this versatile application.

We must say that many of those that are currently on the market for free, have the same utilities as this one, and also a practically traced interface.

To access it, we will have several ways, as has been normal in Windows. The simplest of all is from the Windows shortcut menu. This menu can be opened with the key combination " Windows + X " or by right-clicking on the start menu button. Be careful, this menu is NOT the start menu.

We will have to identify the option " Disk Management ", this will be the application that interests us.

We will enter an application where our partitions, hard drives, CD-ROM drives, removable drives, and in general everything that is intended for storage on our computer are displayed in a higher list. We will call this mounted volumes.

In the lower area, which is what interests us, we have our hard drives and a graphic representation of the partitions they have inside. In addition to the format that is in them: if it is a pendrive it will be FAT32, if it is a hard disk, it will be NTFS.

In our image you will see that one of the disks is green, this is because it is configured as a dynamic disk. We are not interested in that now, surely yours is in blue, just like our "Disc 1".

Visit this tutorial to learn more about dynamic disks and how to convert basic disk to dynamic.

What we want is to delete partitions from the hard disk. We must bear in mind that the only partition that we cannot delete from this program is the one in which the operating system is installed. All others, including OEM or reserved for the system, can be removed. How? Very easy.

We identify the hard disk that interests us, in our case it will be "Disk 1" (we have two installed).

Right- click on the partition and from the drop-down menu we will choose the " Delete volume... " option. A window will appear saying that if you delete a partition, all its content will also be deleted.

Press " Yes " and the space that the partition had will be black and with the name " Not assigned ".

We are going to repeat the process with the other partitions, in case we want to eliminate all the partitions from the hard disk. The result will be this:

An entire disk with " unallocated space ". But of course, being this way our disk is absolutely useless, now we will have to format it to use it. Right-click again on the black space, and choose the option " New simple volume... ".

Then a wizard for creating a partition will appear. On the first screen click " Next ", and now:

We must choose the amount of space that the partition will have. If we want it to be the entire disk, click on "Next".

Now we assign a letter to the new volume. If we don't assign a letter, we won't be able to use the disk to save files.

Finally, we choose " Format this volume with the following settings:". We chose " NFTS ", Default ", we put a name to the label and we chose fast format.

And it would be. We have removed all partitions and created only one. We can continue using our hard drive, which is now completely clean.

Check this article if you want to know more about the Hard Disk Manager.

Delete partitions in Windows 10 with Diskpart

Now we are going to do this same procedure using a tool that works through commands. Its name is Diskpart, and it is very simple when we know how it works.

To use it we have to start the Windows command console, either Command Prompt by typing "CMD" in the start menu, or Windows PowerShell from the menu that we have seen before. In both cases, we will have to have administrator permission to do the actions.

We are going to use PowerShell taking advantage of the fact that we already know where it is. We choose the option that is in parentheses " Administrator ".

To start the program we write this command and press Enter:

diskpart

We need to know which hard drive we are going to delete the partitions from. We list them like this:

list disk

We must identify them by their amount of storage, there is no other way. The problem is that the two hard drives we have are 50 GB. How do we know which one we should strike? We would know because the system is dynamic and an asterisk appears in it, but there is another clearer way.

We must select a hard drive to " enter it ":

select disk

Now we are going to see its properties and the partitions that this unit has with:

detail disk

If we look, we have three partitions, but this disk is the system disk, since it says " system " on one of them. This is not the disk we want, let's try the other one:

select disk 1

detail disk

This is already better. This is the one we want to load. For this we only write:

clean

We just removed all the partitions from the floppy disk. Now it has been left as "unassigned", just like before. We can prove it by listing its partitions with:

list partition

detail disk

Let's now create a partition that occupies the entire hard disk. To do this we will have to write:

create partition primary

To create a primary partition that takes up the entire disk.

format fs = NTFS label = ” ”Quick

To format the hard disk in NTFS quickly.

activate

To activate the partition.

assign letter =

Done, the hard disk is operational and completely clean to be used again.

Delete partitions in Windows 10 with USB system installation

The last way we will see is to format any of the hard drives that we have on our computer using the USB or DVD installation of Windows 10. In this way we can also format the hard disk where the operating system is installed. Obviously we should install the system again from scratch.

Of course, to do this procedure, we will first have to create a bootable USB with a Windows 10 image inside. And then to be able to boot this bootable USB on our computer.

At this point, you will have booted your USB and the Windows 10 installation wizard will have appeared. Again we will have two options to remove partitions from a hard disk.

With Command Prompt

We are going to give " Repair equipment ", then " solve problems ", and " command prompt ".

At this point we will use the same as in the previous section Diskpart to carry out the elimination of the partitions. So, go upstairs and you can see what the process is like.

With Windows 10/8/7 installation wizard

The other way is through the Windows 10 installation process itself, so in this case we can click “ Install now ” on the initial screen.

We follow the steps indicated by the wizard until we reach a window with two options in which we will have to choose the installation mode: " Custom ".

Then we will access a tool that lists all the volumes mounted on the system. In it, we must select each partition and click on " Delete " and " Format " if the previous one is not active.