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

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

If your USB flash drive, SD card, or another drive isn’t working quite right, “cleaning” the drive and removing its partitions is one possible solution. This can fix problems with a drive that can’t be formatted or one that shows the wrong capacity.

This trick will also delete partitions that can’t be deleted with normal tools, like the graphicalDisk Management disk-partitioning tool built into Windows. This process will completely erase the partition table from a disk, allowing you to set it back up again.

Warning: This process will completely wipe the entire disk you select, so be sure you back up any important files first. You should also be very careful to specify the correct disk, or you could accidentally wipe the wrong disk.

Launch a Command Prompt as Administrator

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

On Windows 7, you’ll need to locate the “Command Prompt” shortcut in the Start menu — you can just search for “Command Prompt” in the Start menu. Right-click the Command Prompt shortcut and select “Run as Administrator.”

Use diskpart to Clean a Disk

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

To launch the diskpart tool, type the following command into the Command Prompt window and press Enter:

diskpart

Have diskpart list the disks connected to the computer by typing the following command and 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.

Once you know the disk number you want to select, type the following command, replacing # with the number of the disk you identified above.

Warning: Be very careful you specify the correct disk number! Enter the wrong disk number and you’ll end up blowing away everything on the wrong disk.

select disk #

The diskpart command has now selected the disk you specified. Any actions you perform will now be performed on the selected disk. To completely wipe the selected disk’s partition table, type the following command and press Enter.

Warning: This will erase all data on the selected disk! Be sure you have backups of the important data before continuing!

clean

You’ll see a “diskpart succeeded in cleaning the disk” if everything worked properly. You’re now done. Close the Command Prompt window to continue.

Partition and Format the Disk

You should now be able to initialize, partition, and format the disk like you normally would, using the graphical Disk Management tool built into Windows. You could also use the diskpart command to do this, but it’s probably easier to use the graphical interface.

To launch Disk Management on Windows 10 or 8.1, right-click the Start button and select “Disk Management”. On Windows 7, press Windows Key + R, type “diskmgmt.msc” into the Run dialog that appears, and press Enter.

You’ll see the disk now has no partitions. Right-click the unallocated space and select “New Simple Volume” to create a partition on the disk and format it with your desired file system. By default, Windows will create a single partition that spans the entire drive.

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Difference Between FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS?

 Difference Between FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS?

Whether you’re formatting an internal drive, external drive, USB flash drive, or SD card, Windows will give you the choice of NTFS, FAT32, and exFAT. The Format dialog in Windows doesn’t explain the difference, so we will.

FAT32 is an older file system that’s largely relegated to USB flash drives and other external drives. Windows uses NTFS for its system drive, and it’s also ideal for other internal drives. exFAT is a modern replacement for FAT32, and more devices support it than do NTFS — although it’s not as widespread as FAT32.

FAT32

FAT32 is the oldest file system here. It was introduced all the way back in Windows 95 to replace the older FAT16 file system.

This file system’s age has advantages and disadvantages. Because it’s so old, it’s the de-facto standard. Flash drives you purchase will often come formatted with FAT32 for maximum compatibility across not just modern computers, but other devices like game consoles and anything with a USB port.

Limitations come with that age, however. Individual files on a FAT32 drive can’t be over 4 GB in size — that’s the maximum. A FAT32 partition must also be less than 8 TB, which is less of a limitations — but still a noticeable one if you have a new, high-capacity mechanical drive.

While this file system is okay for USB flash drives and other external media, you won’t want to use this for an internal drive. It lacks the permissions and other security features built into the more modern NTFS file system. Modern versions of Windows can no longer be installed to FAT32, and must be installed onto drives formatted with NTFS.

Compatibility: Works with all versions of Windows, Mac, Linux, game consoles, and practically anything with a USB port.

Limits: 4 GB maximum file size, 8 TB maximum partition size.

Ideal Use: Use it on removable drives for maximum compatibility with the widest range of devices, assuming you don’t have any files 4 GB or larger in size.

NTFS

NTFS is the modern file system Windows likes to use. When you install Windows, it formats your system drive with the NTFS file system. NTFS has file size and partition size limits that are so theoretically huge you won’t run up against them. NTFS first appeared in consumer versions of Windows with Windows XP.

Aside from these limitations, NTFS is packed with other modern features. It supports file permissions for security, a change journal that can help quickly recover errors if your computer crashes, shadow copies for backups, encryption, disk quota limits, hard links, and other various features. Many of these are crucial for an operating system drive — especially file permissions.

Your Windows system partition must be NTFS. If you have a secondary drive alongside Windows and you plan on installing programs to it, you should probably go ahead and make it NTFS, too.

However, NTFS just isn’t as compatible with other operating systems. It’ll work with all recent versions of Windows — all the way back to Windows XP — but it has limited compatibility with other operating systems. By default, Mac OS X can only read NTFS drives, not write to them. Some Linux distributions may enable NTFS-writing support, but some may be read-only. None of Sony’s PlayStation consoles support NTFS. Even Microsoft’s own Xbox 360 can’t read NTFS drives, although the new Xbox One can. Other devices are even less likely to support NTFS.

Compatibility: Works with all versions of Windows, but read-only with Mac by default, and may be read-only by default with some Linux distributions. Other devices — with the exception of Microsoft’s Xbox One — probably won’t support NTFS.

Limits: No realistic file-size or partition size limits.

Ideal Use: Use it for your Windows system drive and other internal drives that will just be used with Windows.

exFAT

exFAT was introduced in 2006, and was added to older versions of Windows with updates to Windows XP and Windows Vista.

It’s a file system optimized for flash drives. It’s designed to be a lightweight file system like FAT32 without all NTFS’s extra features and overhead, but without FAT32’s limitations.

Like NTFS, exFAT has very large file size and partition size limits. This means you can store files that are larger than 4 GB apiece on a flash drive or SD card if it’s formatted with exFAT. exFAT is a strict upgrade over FAT32, and should be the best choice for external drives where you want a lightweight file system without FAT32’s file size limits.

exFAT is also more compatible than NTFS. While Mac OS X includes only read-only support for NTFS, Macs offer full read-write support for exFAT. exFAT drives can be accessed on Linux by installing the appropriate software.

While exFAT is compatible with Macs — and will be compatible with some devices that don’t support NTFS, like digital cameras — it still isn’t quite as compatible. Microsoft’s own Xbox 360 doesn’t support it, although the Xbox One does. The PlayStation 3 doesn’t support exFAT drives, although the PlayStation 4 reportedly does. Various other older devices may only support FAT32 instead of exFAT.

Compatibility: Works with all versions of Windows and modern versions of Mac OS X, but requires additional software on Linux. More devices support exFAT than support NTFS, but some — particularly older ones — may only support FAT32.

Limits: No realistic file-size or partition-size limits.

Ideal Use: Use it for USB flash drives and other external drives, especially if you need files of over 4 GB in size. Assuming every device you want to use the drive with supports exFAT, you should format your device with exFAT instead of FAT32.

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NTFS is ideal for internal drives, while exFAT is generally ideal for flash drives. However, you may sometimes need to format an external drive with FAT32 if exFAT isn’t supported on a device you need to use it with.