DISKPART Commands to delete hard disk partitions

Windows has a GUI program called Disk Management which can be used to format, delete partitions, create partitions, shrink volume, expand volume etc. However, it cannot do most of the activities on system partitions. We cannot delete a system partition using the Disk Management program for example as it is greyed out. To delete system partition, we can use the command line instead.

In this post, we shall see how to use the DISKPART command line to delete hard disk partition.


How to start DISKPART in Windows Command Prompt:

• Press START and type CMD
• Right click on the COMMAND PROMPT and click "Run as administrator"
• This will open the COMMAND PROMPT
• Type DISKPART to get into DISKPART command

DISKPART: HOW TO SHOW THE DISKS ON THE COMPUTER

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online          223 GB      0 B        *
  Disk 1    Online         1863 GB  1861 GB        *

DISKPART: HOW TO SELECT A DRIVE

DISKPART> select disk 1

Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART: HOW TO SHOW THE PARTITIONS ON A DISK

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    System             260 MB  1024 KB
  Partition 2    Reserved            16 MB   261 MB
  Partition 4    Recovery          1000 MB  1862 GB

DISKPART: HOW TO SELECT A PARTICULAR PARTITION

DISKPART> select partition 1

Partition 1 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART: HOW TO DELETE A PARTITION

While attempting to delete a system protected partition using diskpart, we may encounter an error-  Cannot delete a protected partition without the force protected parameter set.

DISKPART> delete partition

Virtual Disk Service error:
Cannot delete a protected partition without the force protected parameter set.

Here we encountered an error, since the partition is system protected. So we need to override.

DISKPART> delete partition override

DiskPart successfully deleted the selected partition.

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 2    Reserved            16 MB   261 MB
  Partition 4    Recovery          1000 MB  1862 GB