A Simple Guide On Flash Drive Partition Removal in Windows

Introduction

Windows is a great operating system in many ways, but it also has its shortcomings in some areas and at times some hard to understand limitations. One of those limitations originates in Disk Management where you can’t delete partitions from USB Flash Drives (UFD) and that can be an issue if you want to change this at a later time. As we can see in the image below, the option to delete the volume is simply greyed out and not available.

For all other types of drives, you simply enter the Disk Management and right click the drive, choose the delete option and you are set. Keep in mind, this will delete all data on the drive, so use it with care and be sure that you select the correct drive before you delete anything.

Besides some USB Flash Drives, I’ve also attached a portable USB hard disk drive here and as we can see below, there is no problem deleting the volume on that drive.

But where there is a problem, there is a way to work around it and in this case you don’t even need any extra tools or applications. Windows has a relative powerful command prompt with a lot of useful but not really visible functions and that is what I’ll be using today to show you how you can remove a partition from a UFD.

Preparation

There are a few things that you can do in advance to make thing easier. First of all, eject all drives that you don’t want to delete. In the above images, you can see that I got a total of three flash drives with the same capacity plugged in beside the USB HDD and my system drive with my Windows installation. When we move forward to the next steps, we will only be able to recognize drives by their size – at least initially. By removing all but the one where we want to delete the volume from, the steps get easier.

Below is a screenshot which illustrates the just mentioned problem, three drives all with the same size, but we only want to delete the volume from one of them.