Knowing how to delete a partition on a hard drive is an important technique to protect your data, especially when you want to recycle or sell your hard drive. Besides, you can also expand a partition by deleting another partition. This tutorial will provide two solutions to delete partitions on hard drives for Windows and Mac. Be aware that deleting a partition will erase all data previously stored on that partition, so make sure you back up anything important.
Steps
Method 1
Method 1 of 3:
Disk Management on Windows
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1Open Disk Management. Disk Management is the built-in tool on your Windows PC for managing hard drives. You can open it by searching the Start menu for 'Create and format hard disk partitions'.
- You can also open it using the registry. To do this, open the Run window by hitting+ R . Then, type diskmgmt.msc and click "OK" to open Disk Management.
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2Choose the target hard drive. In the Disk Management interface, select the hard drive on the left, for example Disk 0 or Disk 1.
- Make sure you select the correct disk at this stage, you don't want to accidentally erase the wrong disk!
- You can identify the disk using the capacity, or the disk letter.
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3Select the target partition. Click the partition with the right mouse button and choose "Delete Volume."
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4Select "Yes" in the pop-up confirmation window. This may take some time. After the operation, the partition you deleted will become an unallocated space on the disk, that you can format or use for a new partition.Advertisement
Method 2
Method 2 of 3:
Diskpart on Windows
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1Open diskpart. Press+ R and type diskpart.exe in the run window.
- As you're editing important settings, you'll have to have administrator privileges for this to work.
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2Enter list disk into the command line. This will list all your available disks, from here, choose the disk you want to make changes to.
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3Enter select disk 0 , making sure you replace '0' with the number of the disk you want to edit.
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4Enter list partition . This will display the list of partitions on the drive, allowing you to choose the one you would like to delete.
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5Enter select partition 0 , making sure you replace '0' with the number of the partition you want to delete.
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6Enter delete partition . This will erase the partition on your hard drive, allowing you to reformat it, or allocate a new partition.Advertisement
Method 3
Method 3 of 3:
Disk Utility on Mac
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1Access Disk Utility. You can find Disk Utility via Finder or Utilities. Scroll down in Utilities, find and double-click to open Disk Utility.
- Scroll down in Utilities, find and double-click on Disk Utility to open it.
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2Choose the target drive. Select the drive you want to delete on the left side of the window. Make sure that the drive is connected correctly.
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3Delete the partition. Select the "Partition" tab at the top, and choose the partition in the pop-up pie chart you want to delete. Click the - below the pie chart to delete the partition, then, click "Apply" to apply changes.Advertisement
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