Solved Drive partitioning

needlenoses · Oct 27, 2022

Sorry guys, been a while for me. I have a WD (blue) 1T hard drive and I want to re-partition it (Disk 4) just like Drive D and E. Data storage only with no recovery partitions. Just can't recall the procedure. It will be used for storage only.
hopefully I can get help with disk manager!!

it

glasskuter · Oct 27, 2022

Open Disk Management. On the target disk right click on each partition and delete volume, leaving the entire disk as unallocated.

Right-click the empty GPT disk and click Convert to MBR disk

Right click on the unallocated space and select create new simple volume.

needlenoses · Oct 27, 2022

No problem creating a new healthy partition 914.65 GB ntfs, but the 800MB health partition wont erase as won't the EFI partition or the 15.70 partition. Still showing up. And yes, I did format the new partition.

glasskuter · Oct 27, 2022

You should easily be able to remove the partitions that were undeletable using diskpart. Just make sure you select the correct disk.

open Command Prompt and select “Run as administrator“.
After opening the Command Prompt with admin rights, type “diskpart” and press Enter.
type list disk to list all available disks.
identify the disk you want to wipe.
Next, type select disk X. (Replace the X with the correct number of your drive)Enter
Once the disk is selected, type “clean” and press Enter.
As soon as you execute the clean command, diskpart will delete all partitions and mark all space as unallocated. You will see the “DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk” message once it is done.
type convert mbr and hit enter. You can followup with another list disk to verify that all the space on the disk is now unallocated

Note: At this point you could use more diskpart commands to create a new partition but I find it easier to create a new partition using disk management.

type exit to get out of diskpart

EDITED: So that anyone finding and using this solution, per the learned folks here I have edited this solution to change step 6 command from CLEAN ALL to CLEAN in order to save time. If anyone wants to secure erase all data on the disk and make that data unrecoverable, one would then use the CLEAN ALL command. Thank you for correcting me @Ghot
@needlenoses Though this solved your problem, I'm sorry I did not give you the command that would have saved you a lot of time.

needlenoses · Oct 27, 2022

That did the trick. Thanks very much. Want to do a full diag on this drive tomorrow to look for any bad sectors etc.

Ghot · Oct 27, 2022

needlenoses said:
View attachment 43549
That did the trick. Thanks very much. Want to do a full diag on this drive tomorrow to look for any bad sectors etc.

Just open a command prompt and type: chkdsk f: /r

needlenoses · Oct 27, 2022

Ran the Western Digital Dashboard on the drive and it checked out ok. Thanks.

zbook · Oct 27, 2022

With the clean all command there were zeros written to every sector.
Running chkdsk /r after a clean all should display no problems unless the drive has a brand new failure after the clean all.

clean

Reference article for the Diskpart clean command, which removes all partitions or volume formatting from the disk with focus.

learn.microsoft.com

Code:

The clean all command performs the same action as the clean command above, 
but includes to specify that each and every sector on the disk is zeroed (secure erase), 
which completely deletes all data contained on the disk. 
This will make the data on the disk unrecoverable. It will take about an hour per 320 GB 
to finish running the "clean all" command on a disk.

Erase Disk using Diskpart Clean Command in Windows 10

How to Erase a Disk using Diskpart Clean Command in Windows 10

www.tenforums.com

needlenoses · Oct 27, 2022

Yep; took a long, long time for a 1T drive connected usb 3.

zbook · Oct 27, 2022

Disk 2 has 3 recovery partitions.
These can be left as is as they are less than 1 GB each.

If you wanted to you could restore an image of disk 2 C: drive onto a clean install on disk 4.
Then you could clean disk 2 and use it as a storage drive.

Again this is not required but only an option to remove all of the extra orphaned recovery partitions.

Disk 4 would need to be a SSD instead of HD so that Windows can boot on a SSD instead of HD.

Disk 3 was not in the earlier disk management image.

needlenoses · Oct 27, 2022

The new disk 4 is a actually a very full 4T Usb 3 passport drive that I use for PLEX files. Disk 0 i used for movie and photo and music stuff. Manipulation only. It is a 1T drive but a 250 gig would work. Just has a spare1 T hanging around, and now I have 2 hanging around, the latest in a zip lock for now.

glasskuter · Oct 27, 2022

@Ghot @needlenoses @zbook To make it a shorter process for anyone who may reference the procedure in the future, I corrected the post per your excellent advice.

zbook · Oct 27, 2022

Disk 1 is likely formatted as a GPT partitioned drive to be able to use all of the 4TB as storage.

Disk 4 could also remain as a GPT partitioned drive.