Diskpart refusing to delete partition

Dangerous_Dave · 13 Oct 2017 at 12:09

I have a hard drive I'm trying to wipe but one of the partitions cannot be deleted either in disk management (windows 8.1) or diskpart. It keeps telling me that it can't delete the active boot drive or similar - but the thing is it ISN'T the active boot drive. Windows is installed and booting from my SSD. So I have no idea why it's refusing to remove the partition.

Can anyone help?

El Jimben · 13 Oct 2017 at 16:06

What about if you do 'Delete partition override' in Diskpart? That worked for me yesterday when deleting Recovery Partitions that were apparently GPT when they weren't.

Glanza · 13 Oct 2017 at 16:10

What commands are you using in diskpart?

Should be as simple as:

cmd>diskpart
list disk
select disk
clean

PiKe · 13 Oct 2017 at 16:14

Sometimes, depending on which SATA channel the drive is on, the windows boot loader ends up on the wrong disk.

You may well find if you do find a way to clear the drive, your Pc wont boot and you'll need to run a repair from the Windows DVD.

Dangerous_Dave · 13 Oct 2017 at 17:05

I'm pretty sure there weren't any boot loader files on the drive - it was just being awkward. I tried the override commands and clean etc but none of that worked. What I used in the end that did work (dredged up from a distant memory) was EaseUS partition master. That was able to get the job done finally.