Introduction
I appear to gather USB drives. They’re handed out at conferences. They’re used as restoration media for brand spanking new machines. They only randomly seem on my desk. I exploit them to construct dwell Linux CDs, transferring media from one gadget to a different, constructing restoration media, and customarily the belongings you’d count on a USB drive for use for. Typically, once I use a USB drive the very first thing I do is format it. My USB drives aren’t for long run storage and I think about something on them used one time then the drive goes again to the bin for reuse one other time.
An annoyance with this, although, is that once I use a drive to construct a bootable backup media, typically instances an EFI partition shall be created. As quickly as that is created, Home windows prevents that partition from being deleted sooner or later with out taking extra steps. I’ve to go look these up each time as a result of I do it sometimes sufficient to recollect. This can be a easy walkthrough of my course of to unravel this downside
A USB drive with an EFI partition seems like this inside the Disk Administration software in Home windows
Format an EFI Partition
To take away this partition, make the most of the inbuilt diskpart software. Win + R and kind in diskpart and permit the applying to run.
First it’s essential to discover which drive you need to modify partitions on.
Consideration
Guarantee you choose the right disk. Failure to take action might lead to an inoperable system
Plug the USB drive into the machine and run record disk to see all out there disks.
DISKPART> record disk
Disk ### Standing Measurement Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 On-line 3726 GB 1024 KB *
Disk 1 On-line 931 GB 1024 KB *
Disk 2 On-line 14 GB 14 GB
You’ll be able to see that I’ve 3 drives detected. Disk 2 is my USB drive.
Choose the disk.
DISKPART> sel disk 2
Disk 2 is now the chosen disk.
Then present the partitions on the disk.
DISKPART> record partition
Partition ### Kind Measurement Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
Partition 1 System 4000 KB 850 KB
There’s a single partition – the EFI partition. The remainder of the drive is unallocated, because the screenshot above exhibits. Choose this partition. IF you might have a number of partitions listed, you will want to find out which is the EFI partition. In my case, since I will be formatting all the drive anyway, if there have been a number of listed I would choose and delete every particular person partition.
DISKPART> sel partition 1
Partition 1 is now the chosen partition.
Consideration
These instructions will delete a partition. If you have not chosen the fitting drive or partition issues will break.
Lastly, delete the EFI partition
DISKPART> delete partition override
DiskPart efficiently deleted the chosen partition.
From the disk administration software, you may confirm it is gone and format as regular.
