Clean a drive with diskpart

A fast and easy way to remove all partitions and data from a disk or USB drive is the built in tool in Windows called Diskpart.

Open a command prompt and type

diskpart

List all connected disks and USB drives.

list disk

Select the disk you want to clean (replace 7 with the number of your drive from the list disk command).

select disk 7

Double check that the disk is selected. There should be an asterisk (*) in front of the selected drive.

list disk

Clean the drive

clean

You should see a message saying Diskpart succeeded in cleaning the disk.

Now create the partition.

create partition primary

Select the newly created partition.

select partition 1

Make the partition active

active

Format the drive. Replace ntfs if you want another filesystem, like fat32. The label can be whatever you want.

format fs=ntfs label=Data quick

Assign a drive letter

assign letter=U

Quit Diskpart

exit