Formatting your hard drive is an important step in setting up your computer. It clears all the data off the disk so that you can start fresh. DiskPart is a powerful command-line tool that allows you to manage your hard drives. In this article, I will walk you through the steps of formatting a hard drive using DiskPart.
DiskPart is a command-line tool that allows you to manage your hard drives. You can use it to create, delete, and format partitions. You can also use it to assign drive letters and mount points. DiskPart is a powerful tool, and it can be dangerous if used incorrectly. In this article, I will use DiskPart to format the entire hard drive. Before we begin, make sure that you have a backup of your data.
Last week, I discussed how to use this command on the various disk partitions on a hard drive, including the formatting of a disk partition. CAUTION: This article discusses formatting the entire disk drive, meaning that all partitions on the disk drive will be eliminated.
Launching the DiskPart is not a big task. You are just required to open the Windows command terminals, either the Command Prompt or Windows PowerShell with the administrative rights. Here is how to open and use DiskPart using Command Prompt:
If you face a problem in formatting the system hard disk, external hard drive, or the USB Flash drive, then using DiskPart, you can easily wipe them out. Obviously, you will not be able to clean the disk on which your OS is installed, so you will have to boot from a system install CD to clean, delete partitions, and then format the entire disk. This process is for all secondary drives (system drive not included). Using a system installation CD, you can use the command processor function to perform these actions.
Here are the steps to format the hard disk using DiskPart:
I hope this article has helped you to understand how to use Diskpart to clean and format your disk drive. An important difference in this article vs last week, is that this week the discussion is for the entire disk drive that will normally contain a number of partitions. The difference is that this process clears the entire drive and all partitions, whereas, last week the discussion was for a partition located on the disk drive. A couple of questions and answers.
Answer: Yes, formatting your hard drive will erase all of the data on the drive. Be sure to back up any important files before you format the drive. Use with caution!
Answer: Yes, you can use Diskpart to format a USB flash drive. However, be aware that formatting will erase all of the data on the drive.
Note: a word of caution — a disk device can, and most likely does, have multiple disk volumes called partitions. The c-drive is only one of the volumes. There are other volumes that are used by the operation system, so be very careful when selecting the volume to clean and/or reformat.
Stay protected!
George Cox is the owner of Computer Diagnostics and Repair. He can be reached at 346-4217.
