How to “Clean” a Pen Drive (Flash Drive), SD Card, or Internal Drive to Fix Partition and Capacity Problems

How to “Clean” a Pen Drive (Flash Drive), SD Card, or Internal Drive to Fix Partition and Capacity Problems

Step One: Launch a Command Prompt as Administrator

First, you’ll need to launch a Command Prompt window as administrator. On Windows 10 or 8.1, right-click the Start button (or press Windows Key + X) and select “Command Prompt (Admin).”

Step Two: Use “diskpart” to Clean a Disk

We’ll be using the diskpart command to clean the disk. Before continuing, be sure you’ve connected the USB flash drive, SD card, or whatever other drive you want to clean.

Notice that the prompt changes to “DISKPART>” to indicate you’re now issuing commands to that tool.

Next, have diskpart list the disks connected to the computer by typing the following command and then pressing Enter:

list disk

Examine the output of the command to identify the number of the disk you want to clean. Be very careful here! If you select the wrong disk number, you’ll clean the wrong disk and you could lose important data.

In the screenshot below, we can see that “Disk 0” is 238 GB in size and “Disk 1” is 14 GB in size. We know that our particular USB drive is 14 GB in size. This tells us that Disk 1 is the USB drive connected to the computer, and Disk 0 is the computer’s internal system drive.

When you know the disk number you want to select, type the following command, replacing # with the number of the disk you identified above. Again, be absolutely sure you have the right disk number.

select disk #

Now that you’ve selected the disk, any further commands you issue to the diskpart tool will be performed on the selected disk. To completely wipe the selected disk’s partition table, type the following command and then press Enter. Remember, this command will completely wipe the disk, so be sure you have any important files backed up.

clean

You’ll see a message stating that “DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk” if everything worked properly.

You’re now done.