How to delete partitions on a flash drive

One of the problems that users may encounter is that there are multiple partitions on a flash drive or other USB drive, where Windows only sees the first partition (resulting in less available USB capacity). This can happen after being formatted by some programs or devices (when formatting the drive that is not in the computer), sometimes you may have the problem creating a bootable drive on a large flash drive or external hard drive, as an example.

Having said this, it is not feasible to erase partitions on a flash drive using disk management utility in Windows 7, 8 and Windows 10 before Creators versions UpdateThe term "UPDATE" It is commonly used in the technological and communication field to refer to the action of updating information, Software or Systems. In a world in constant evolution, Updates are essential to improve security, fix bugs and add new features. Businesses and users should keep an eye on available updates to ensure optimal performance and maintain the integrity of their devices and data....: all relevant items to work on (“Clear volume”, “Compress volume”, etc. ) they are simply inactive. This tutorial details how to erase partitions on a USB stick depending on the version of the system installed., and there is also a video tutorial on the procedure at the end.

Note: From version 1703 Windows 10, it is feasible to work with flash drives containing multiple partitions; see How to partition a flash drive in Windows 10.

How to erase partitions of a flash drive in Disk Management (Windows only 10 1703, 1709 and later versions)

As previously noted, the latest versions of Windows 10 are capable of handling multiple partitions on removable USB drives, including partition deletion in built-in utility “Disk management”. The procedure will be as follows (note: all data on the flash drive will be erased in the procedure).

1. Presione Win + R on your keyboard, scribe diskmgmt.msc and hit Enter.
2. At the bottom of the Disk Management window, locate your flash drive, right click on one of the partitions and select the menu option “Clear volume”. Repeat this for the rest of the volumes (you still can't delete only the last volume and later expand the previous one).
3. When there is only one unused space left on the unit, right click on it and select the menu option “Create simple volume”.

All other steps will follow in the simple volume creation wizard and when the procedure is done, you will have a single partition taking up all the free space on your USB drive.

Erase partitions on a USB drive using DISKPART

In early versions of Windows 7, 8 and Windows 10, actions on USB flash drive partitions are not available in Disk Management utility, so you will have to resort to using DISKPART on the command line.

To erase all partitions on the flash drive (the data will also be deleted, be careful to keep them safe), run command line as administrator.

In Windows 10, start writing “Symbol of the system” in taskbar search, then right-click on the result and select “Execute as an administrator”, in Windows 8.1 you can press Win + X and choose the desired item, and in Windows 7, look for the command prompt in the Start menu, right click and select Run as administrator.

Thereafter, enter the following commands in order, pressing Enter after each command (the screenshot below the command list shows the complete procedure of the USB partition removal task):

1. disc piece
2. list of discs
3. In the list of units, find your flash drive, we will need your number. North. Do not mix it with other disk drives (the actions described will cause the data to be erased).
4. choose disk N (where N is the number of the flash drive)
5. clean up (The command will remove all partitions from the flash drive. Also you can delete them one by one with the list of partitions, choose partition and erase partition).
6. From this moment, there are no partitions on the USB and you can format it with standard Windows tools, resulting in a single primary partition. But you can still use DISKPART, all the commands below will create an active partition and format it to FAT32.
7. create primary partition
8. select partition 1
9. active
10. formato fast fs = fat32
12. Shall