If our pen or USB stick, or the SD card, or any other external or internal unit that can be connected to the PC as an additional disk does not work perfectly, we can try to "clean" the unit and, therefore, delete everything inside, delete every partition and, in fact, format the drive completely. The mode that we explain in this article is of a definitive and resolutive type, in the sense that it works even if you are unable to format the USB stick in the standard way (i.e. from the properties menu that appears by pressing the right mouse button on the icon of the 'unit).
Furthermore, cleaning the space of the USB stick or SD card allows you to recover the real full capacity in case the detection of the available capacity is incorrect.
This trick deletes the partitions of the drive, if any, which also cannot be deleted with normal tools such as the Disk Management tool built into Windows.
This process completely erases the partition table of a disk and allows you to format the USB stick or SD card .
READ ALSO: Repair the broken USB stick that does not open on PC
First of all, be careful that this process completely erases the selected disk, so you have to be very careful in specifying the correct disk.
Then open a command prompt window as an administrator.
In Windows 10 or 8.1, you can simply right-click on the Start button and select " Command Prompt (administrator) ".
In Windows 7, however, you can find the " Command Prompt " in the Start menu.
Connect the USB drive or SD card or any other drive to be completely cleaned and format and type the following commands by pressing Enter after each of them
diskpart
The list of connected units then appears.
list disk
To recognize the disc to be cleaned identified by a number.
At this stage do not confuse the disks because otherwise you will delete the wrong one.
To adjust, just see the indicated capacity, so if we have a 16 GB USB stick, we should easily find it.
When you know the disk number, type the following command:
select disk #
Replace the # with the correct number.
The diskpart command has now selected a disk, so to completely erase the partition table of the USB drive or SD card, type the following command and press Enter:
clean
Close the command prompt window to continue.
NOTE: Before executing the clean command, it may be necessary to unlock the write protection of the USB stick with the command:
attributes disk clear readonly
Partition and format the disk
Once cleaned up, you can format the disk for use.
You can then use the diskpart command or, more easily, use the Windows Disk Management tool.
Using the command prompt, after clean, run the following commands and press Enter after each one:
create partition primary
Active
format fs = ntfs label = "give a name"
in fs = you can also choose fat32 or fat16.
Finally, run the Assign command and exit.
If you prefer to use the graphical interface, you can start Disk Management in Windows 10 or 8.1 by clicking on the Start button and searching for "Disk Management".
In Windows 7, press the Windows + R keys, type diskmgmt.msc in the Run window that appears and press Enter.
In the disk management you will see the various partitions and you can click on the unallocated space and select " New simple volume " to create a partition on the disk and format it with the ntfs or fat32 file system.
By default, Windows creates a single partition for the entire drive which will be fine.
READ ALSO: How to format USB sticks and hard drives: difference between NTFS, FAT32 and FAT
