How To Use Diskpart To Clean A Drive

Reset Your SSD with Windows^® DiskPart

These steps show you how to use the Windows DiskPartClean command to quickly delete any partitions on the SSD and reset it to an uninitialized state. Follow the steps here to reinitialize your drive after resetting it with Windows DiskPart Clean.

Please note, these steps in themselves do not actually remove the data from the cells on the SSD. The command removes any partitions that were created, meaning you no longer can access the data and the drive appears as uninitialized. This is ideal if you have set up an incorrect partition or selected GPT instead of MBR or any other situation where you need to reset the drive to appear as it did when you first received it.

Open command prompt as an Administrator

To run the DiskPart command, you need to open a command prompt as an Administrator.

Windows 8 and later steps:

1. Go to Search and type CMD

2. Command Prompt will appear on the left, right-click it and select Run as Administrator

After the command prompt has started successfully as an Administrator, it will show the path C:\Windows\System32

Windows 7 steps:

Click Start and typecmd into the Search field

2. Cmd.exe will appear at the top, right click on this and choose Run as Administrator

Run DiskPart

1. Typediskpart into the command prompt and pressEnter

2. Typelist disk and pressEnter to see all the attached disks

3. Make sure you know which disk you want to reset before continuing! (If you are unsure, you can double check in Disk Management.)

To check the disk number in Disk Management:

TypeComputer Management into search and open the Computer Management utility
SelectDisk Management near the bottom of the left-hand menu
A list of all attached disks is loaded and listed as Disk 0, Disk 1, etc.
These numbers correspond to the numbers in the list disk above
It should be easy to tell from that list which is the main drive and which is the drive you wish to reset

4. Typeselect disk # and pressEnter (where # is the disk number you want to reset)

5. Typeclean to delete all partitions and reset the drive

6. The drive will now appear as it did when you first purchased it

7. Typeexitand press Enter to exit out of DiskPart

8. Typeexit again and press Enter, or click the X at the top to close the command prompt

Troubleshooting

Permissions

If you get any errors about permissions when trying to run DiskPart, make sure you have administrator privileges on that computer and that the command prompt is opened as an administrator. "Administrator" will appear in the title bar and defaults to the path C:\Windows\system32>.

Writing to disk

If you get a message telling you that the disk cannot be written to or is not accessible, double-check the connection of your SSD. For example if you are using an external caddy, try using an alternative connection like a USB to SATA cable.