Hardware & Technical Repartitioning a USB HDD?

Stealthie

Stealthie
Anybody care to give me a step-by-step idiots guide to deleting partitions on a USB HDD using Windows 10?

Been sorting through all my old portable HDDs and I've found a couple that must've been salvaged from dead laptops and, as a result, have a recovery partition as well as the system partition.

If I'm not mistaken, I can do it by booting up my PC using the W10 disk and then using the disk preparation tools to delete the partitions and reformat the HDDs but I'd rather do it from inside W10 if possible.
Last time I monkeyed around with this stuff was, IIRC, under W7 and that did have all the tools required to do it.

+EDIT+

Should say, I don't need to keep any of the data on the USB HDDs.
I, basically, just need to know what the W10 equivalent of "Fdisk" is, and how to use it.
 
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Patrick_68000

Patrick_68000
Easy, go to Google and type "Repartition an external usb hard disk with windows 10"

It seems that the built-in utility is "Diskmgmt.msc " (which you have to type in "Start" -> "Run")

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Stealthie

Stealthie
Morbad said:
I'd just use diskpart, which has been in every version of Windows since Windows 2000 and replaced fdisk.
Click to expand...

Trouble with this stuff is I find out all about it when I need to, but then I forget it after a couple of years.

I did spend quite a bit of time using the Disk Management utility Patrick mentioned with W7 and it's a very useful tool.

Since I've installed W10, though, I haven't really needed to mess around with that stuff and I wasn't even sure where to find it... or whether it was still a thing.

Turns out, it's still there, in Programs > Windows System > Windows Admin Tools.
That's not immediately obvious because "Windows Admin Tools" appears to be a utility, itself, but it actually opens up a directory full of utilities - including the Disk Management utility.
Certainly easier to access it directly, via the search box, by typing "diskmgmt.msc" as Patrick suggested.
 

Morbad

Morbad
Diskpart is a command line utility. You'd want to press the Windows key + X then "A" to open up an administrator command prompt, then type "diskpart".

Disk Management can do most of what diskpart can, but diskpart allows you to zero write drives and do things like set sector alignments with finer granularity.
 

Noddie

N
Diskpart in in windows. You can use it on anything but the boot partition. So either boot from a Windows tool disk, or alternatively mount the drive up in a USB caddy and do it that way. If you like a Windows tool disk, I recommend Gandalfs.

Just be very, very careful. It would go something like this.

Launch command prompt, then enter each line;

Diskpart
List disk
select disk X (X being the disk you just spotted from "list disk")
clean
create partition primary
Select partition 1
Assign letter=X (X is your choice of drive letter)
Format fs=ntfs quick

That will wipe the HDD and create a new, blank drive on it of your drive letter.

Be CAREFUL - if you wipe a drive using this you'll lose all data on it. Make absolutely sure you've selected the right disk before you enter "clean".
 

Morbad

Morbad
Just the "clean" command won't overwrite data on a mechanical drive (though both clean and a quick format will force a fully drive TRIM on SSDs that support it). To actually destroy data you'd need to use "clean all" (which zero fills the drive) or overwrite it some other way.
 
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