Disk Manager

I was trying to reuse a disk drive today and hit an issue with Disk Manager. The disk was an old boot disk, which I wanted to reuse as a data disk.
I tried to delete the recovery partitions using Disk Manager, but it wouldn't allow me to do that, even though the disk no longer contained Windows. Typical Windows, treating us like idiots. Anyway, I had to download a partition manager to do it. This brought me here, wondering, IS there a way to do it in Windows without using a new app? And if I have to use a new app, what would you recommend. I don't want to buy something because I only use it every few years or so!!!

The easiest way would be to do this command line utility called diskpart. First, use Disk Management to determine what disk number this is (you could do that in diskpart as well, this is just easier).



Then run diskpart.

Within diskpart run these commands (use the disk number you determined above in place of the "x").

select disk x
clean
exit

Now you can go back into Disk Management (refresh if you need to) and that disk should show up as all RAW space with no partitions. You can now continue to set it up however you want in Disk Management. Note that anything you can do in Disk Management you can do in Diskpart (and more), but switching back to Disk Management once the disk is "cleaned" might be easier if you are already familiar with it.

Apologies for the back and forth. As noted, we could have done everything in Diskpart, but since you are already familair with Disk Management, I thought it easier to have you do only the absolute necessary parts in Diskpart, especially since you indicated that this is something you need to do so rarely.

If you are interested in learning a bit more about Diskpart, here's a good article on the topic:

Anyone, and everyone, who's going to futz around with PC's, and hard drives, should have a "Partition Manager" program, preferably on either a bootable CD or Flash Drive.
I like EaseUS Partition Master (Free) to run in Windows, but you have to buy the program to get it to make a Bootable Disk.
When I want to do something that EaseUS PM Free either can't or won't do, I resort to "MiniTool Partition Manager", that I have on a bootable CD and Flash Drive.
Using that, I can do whatever I want with any hard drive, regardless of what OS is on it, or whether it's even an OS drive.

Good Luck Mate!
TM