How to remove all partitions from a disk

Here is an old one that I have been using for years and never thought to document here on my site. Btw, I use this blog a lot for my own documentation. Reason 1 to blog in IT. Want to get rid of everything on a drive? I mean everything, all partitions, data, EVERYTHING. So keep this in mind. Because if you want to save anything make sure to back it up first. Also, this doesn’t completely wipe the drive, it could still be recovered using some utilities. If you want a military grade wipe go shoot it a few times, or use one of those military grade drive wiper cleaners, or toss it in a really hot fire while you’re camping. Probably easier to use the software drive wipers.

1. Open command prompt as administrator.

2. Type diskpart and hit enter.

3. Type list disk and hit enter.

4. View the disks in the list and type select disk X with X being the number of the disk you want to wipe. Be very careful, triple check that list because you don’t want to wipe the wrong drive. In my example I had 3 disks attached to my system but I only wanted to wipe one.

5. After you select the disk just type clean and hit enter. Here is what you should see.

C:\Windows\system32>diskpart

Microsoft DiskPart version 6.3.9600

Copyright (C) 1999-2013 Microsoft Corporation.

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online          167 GB      0 B
  Disk 1    Online          298 GB      0 B        *
  Disk 2    Online          465 GB      0 B

DISKPART> select disk 2

Disk 2 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> clean

DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.

6. Voila, it’s like a brand new hard drive.

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