How to delete a partition on a USB drive?

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You can do this by using diskpart on Windows:

Open an elevated command prompt.
Run diskpart
list disk
Note the disk number that corresponds to your USB drive (it should be obvious going by size)
select disk X where X is the number from step 4
list partition - There should be two, numbered 0 and 1, each about 7 GB
select partition 0
delete partition
select partition 1
delete partition
create partition primary
exit
Exit Command Prompt (type exit or just close the window)
In Windows, go to Computer(or This PC for Windows 10) and try to open the disk. It will ask you to format it.
Format it with the default settings and give it a name if you want.

It should now a single, unified partitioned drive.

K.A.Monica

Posted 2013-01-15T22:10:32.997

Reputation: 5 887

1May uese clean command after step 7 to erases everything on the selected disk. – AzizSM – 2014-10-02T05:35:18.183

2I had to perform four more steps to get my single partition to be recognized by Windows (after step 11) as a letter drive (The biggest is probably the "assign" step. Please note I wasn't trying to save anything on the USB drive so a full format wasn't a concern for me):

11a. select partition 1 11b. active 11c. format fs=ntfs quick 11d. assign – Chad Cook – 2015-05-06T13:03:08.480

4thank you so so much, I had to use delete partition override for it to work. But this answer was perfect and to the point. – Zapnologica – 2015-05-28T18:56:00.003

After recreating the primary partition, my machine running Windows 10 was unwilling to recognize the partition enough to present it in the Computer view or allow it to be formatted using Disk Management or diskpart itself. Converting the disk to GPT using convert gpt after deleting the partition in step 8 allowed the newly created partition to be formatted. Note that you can't do certain things with GPT. I ended up moving it back to MBR (convert mbr) later, and it worked fine. – Charles – 2016-02-17T20:48:22.060

I had an issue where it showed 2 partition 0's (one logical, one extended) and I could not simply remove them as per KA. I took Azi's suggestion and it worked, so I thought I would reiterate the steps with that method.

Open an elevated command prompt.

Run diskpart
list disk
Note the disk number that corresponds to your USB drive (it should be obvious going by size)
select disk X where X is the number from step 4
clean
create partition primary
exit

2016-02-23T13:58:48.647

Worked perfect, used delete partition override because it was a USB from MAC formatted!! – Rodrigo Zuluaga – 2018-10-27T21:08:53.003

wondering if I could do the same for my data partition which isn't a usb but internal on my tower, i just removed ubuntu from itt but im having some healthy efi and healthy oem bios_rvy that i cant seem to be able to delete the simple way – Mr-Programs – 2018-12-14T19:36:25.307

@Mr-Programs: You should be able to if Windows recognizes the hardware. Just make sure you select the correct disk in step 5. – K.A.Monica – 2018-12-15T02:30:56.380

1everything works untill step 6. there is still only 1 partition listed as 7569mb. the problem might be that the second partition is not allocated to anything? – Megaeverything – 2013-01-16T00:01:06.717

I had assumed both were partitioned, but you are probably right. The idea is to completely remove all partitions and then create a new one, which will be default take up the entire flash drive. – K.A.Monica – 2013-01-16T00:03:16.373

1and i do that how? – Megaeverything – 2013-01-16T00:04:10.227

3The steps in my answer will do it for you. If there is only partition 0 and no partition 1, skip steps 8 and 9, but do the rest. – K.A.Monica – 2013-01-16T00:05:37.730

7Instead of selecting every partition one by one and then deleting, you should be able to simply use clean after selecting a disk. – Karan – 2013-01-16T04:58:23.517

How to delete a partition on a USB drive?

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