How to use diskpart to clean and format

Diskpart is a command line utility that allows you to manage disks. Some commands can only be accessed through Diskpart and not through Windows "Disk Manager". This is the reason that it is a powerful tool to see certain disks that do not appear in the "Disk Manager", convert a basic disk into a dynamic disk, use the "clean" command, erase all the information on the disk, manage partitions (create, delete, edit), assign, modify and delete a letter from the reader and format a partition with many possibilities.

Diskpart "Disk Management Tool"

Diskpart can be a very useful tool in some cases where the "Disk Manager" cannot perform certain operations. There are many commands to manage your disks. Here we will see the commands to be able to list, select, clean, partition and format a disk. This tool is integrated to most Windows models: XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 and 10.

If you think your storage drive is malfunctioning and think it could be a software problem, you can use Windows 10 Diskpart command to fix it.

To start this process, you need to have an external storage drive connected to your Windows 10 computer, like a USB flash drive or hard drive, or even an SD card that is not working properly due to data corruption or other serious problem. Many times the Windows 10 formatting tool may not be able to solve the problem, and this is how we resort to the Diskpart command to solve it.

List the disks

1. Use the keyboard shortcut with the Windows key + X to open the context menu of the Start button and select "Command Prompt (Administrator)."

1. Connect the drive you want to clean and format to your computer.

1. Type the command "diskpart" and press "Enter."

1. Type the following command to list all available drives and press "Enter":

list disk

Take your time and identify the drive you want to clean, very carefully, in the result obtained with the previous command.

Diskpart is a powerful tool and, therefore, you must be careful with the wrong manipulations not to make a mistake of disk, since otherwise you would lose all the information.

If your USB flash drive, SD card, or any other drive is not working very well, cleaning the drive and removing partitions may be a possible solution. This can solve problems with a drive that cannot be formatted or one that shows bad capacity.

This process will also erase partitions that cannot be erased with normal tools, such as the "Create and format hard drive partitions" tool integrated in Windows. This process will completely erase the partition table from a disk, allowing you to configure it again.

Select disc

After you know the number of the disk you want to select, type the following command, substituting # for the disk number identified above.

select disk #

Clean disk

The Diskpart command has already selected the disk you specified. Any action you take now will be performed on the selected disk. To clear the partition table of the selected disk, type the following command and press "Enter":

clean

With the task completed you will see a message telling you that Diskpart has successfully cleaned the disk. Now the process is finished. Close the command prompt window to continue.

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Partition and format the disk

Now you should be able to boot the partition and format the disk as you normally would, using the "Disk Management" tool integrated in Windows. You can also use the Diskpart command to do this, but it's probably easier for you to use the graphical user interface.

However, if you want to continue using this tool, you only have to follow the following steps:

1. Run the command "Create partition primary" to create a new primary partition. After being informed about the success of the operation, enter the command "Active" to activate the created partition.

1. To finish, it only remains to format the new partition and associate it with a letter, so that it can be easily accessed through Windows. To do this, enter with "Format FS = NTFS quick" and then:

assign letter = W

1. After the previous process, enter the command "Exit" to end the utility and close the "Command Prompt" window.

Ready! Your storage unit was formatted in a file system compatible with Windows and you can use it normally in the Microsoft operating system.

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