This article shows how to use the DISKPART Windows tool to erase a hard disk that has a protected EFI partition. Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 SP1 and SP2, and Windows Server 2003 R2 retired content. The content you requested has already retired. How to delete a protected EFI disk partition with Windows 7, 8, or Windows 1. Take control of your files and folders with AB Commander file manager for Windows 1. Vista, and XP. Read more.. As you probably know, in order to be able to store files on a hard drive, it needs to be prepared just right: it needs to be initialized, partitioned, and formatted just the right way.
If you've bought an external drive in a store, the preparation has probably been already done by the drive manufacturer. However, what if you want the drive to be prepared differently? For example, you may want to re- format the drive, or change the partitions that it has. The way to do such tasks in Windows is to use the Disk Management tool that comes preinstalled with Windows. To get to the Disk Management tool, click on the Start button, right- click on Computer, and choose Manage from the menu: If you use Windows 1. Start button, and choose Disk Management from the menu instead. If you are not very experienced with computers, you can look, but better not touch and let someone more knowledgeable to do the job. Because with Disk Management it's very easy to destroy your partitions and lose your files, if you don't know what you are doing. Read more.. The most important thing when using the Disk Management tool is to make sure you can identify the disk you want to manage in the list. Usually you can do it by the total size of the disk displayed, although it may be confusing. Windows 2000 and XP allow to use on the system-drive ( C:) the NTFS-file-system, maintaining data-security but allowing limited access to the disk via the Recovery.For example, in this example, a hard drive that's described as a 6. GB drive by the manufacturer, is shown to have only 5. GB by Windows. If in doubt, better unplug all external drives except for the one you actually want to work with, to make sure you are not accidentally erasing data on a wrong disk! In our case, the 6. GB disk (shown as 5. GB disk in the list) is Disk 4 (let's remember this number, we will need it a bit later.) It has two partitions, one is a 2. MB EFI partition that has no drive letter assigned, and another NTFS partition of the size 5. GB, that has the label test and the drive letter F. Although these two partitions looks similar, they are treated very differently by Windows. If you right- click on the normal NTFS partition, you should see the normal menu that lets you perform various tasks on that partition, including the Delete Volume command: However, if we right- click on the first EFI partition, the menu we get is completely disabled: As you can see, the partition is protected in such a way that even the powerful Disk Management tool cannot do anything to it. Note that it's not because the partition is EFI, it's because the tool that created that partition had marked it in a way that prohibits other tools to tamper with it. The tricky part is, that DISKPART is a command- line tool, that requires us to type commands into its command prompt to make it do what we want. To get access to the DISKPART tool, first let's open the Windows command prompt in the . We can do that by clicking the Start button and entering cmd in the search box: (If you use Windows 8 that has no Start Menu, you can get our Start. Finity utility to get the Start Menu back.). Make sure that cmd is highlighted on the menu above, but do not press the Enter key yet! Instead, press the Ctrl and Shift keys together, and while keeping them depressed, press Enter. The Ctrl+Shift combination makes the command prompt to open in the . To start the DISKPART tool, enter the diskpart command into the command prompt window: This should display the DISKPART command prompt. The first command we should use is list disk that should display the list of the disks currently connected to the computer. Encrypt and password- protect external drives with USBCrypt software for Windows 1. XP. Read more.. Again, it's very important to properly identify the disk we want to work with in the list. Our 6. 0 GB disk is still listed as Disk 4 with the capacity 5. GB. Once we are sure that this is the disk we want to re- initialize, we need to select it, by entering the command select disk 4 (yes, that's how selection is usually done when using the command line tools!). Then, let's use the list disk command again, to confirm that the disk in question is indeed now selected: After double- checking that Disk 4 is now selected (it 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 4, including the protected partition. The command that does that is clean. Note that this command erases everything on the selected disk, all partitions, protected or not. If you still have files on other partitions of disk 4 that you want to keep, you should exit now and backup those files, because after using the clean command all such files will be erased without a trace! After the clean command is done (it should take no more than a few seconds), we get a fresh disk with all partitions erased. We can exit the DISKPART command prompt (by typing exit into its command line), and go back to the Disk Management tool (see above how to open it.) When it starts, it automatically detects the presence of the clean disk and prompts us to initialize it: Press OK and the newly cleaned disk will appear in the list. The difference is, the protected EFI partition is gone! To erase such a disk, you need to physically remove it from the computer, attach it to another computer as an external drive, and then use DISKPART on that computer to erase the disk. Happy disk managing! If you want to link to this article, you can use this HTML code: < a href=.
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