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Why can't I delete all partitions on a flash drive in Windows 7?

Fresh7 days ago
Mar 15, 2026184817 views
Confidence Score1%
1%

Problem

Recently I purchased an ADATA C802 8GB flash drive. Since the drive was new I decided to run some of the HD Tune Pro (v4.50) performance tests on it, mostly just for the heck of it. To avoid accidentally destroying data HD Tune refuses to write to a drive unless there are no partitions on the drive. If you do attempt to write to a drive with partitions, it posts the message "Writing is disabled. To enable writing please remove all partitions." As you would expect, the ADATA came formatted with a single primary FAT32 partition in the Master Boot Record. But a number of unexpected things happened when I attempted to delete that partition. The first thing I tried was to use the Windows 7 (64-bit) Disk Management tool ( ) to delete the partition. It would not let me. The context menu choice to delete that volume was not available. Next I opened up a command prompt window with Admin authority and ran . Diskpart deleted the volume for me. However, when I attempted to run an HD Tune write te…

Error Output

diskmgmt.msc

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1 Fix

Canonical Fix
Unverified Fix
New Fix – Awaiting Verification

Fix for: Why can't I delete all partitions on a flash drive in Windows 7?

Low Risk

There's no need to install any third-party programs, Windows already includes everything you need. Just open up command prompt and enter the following commands in sequence: Select the disk that you want to correct. Example: I want to remove all partitions on Disk 1: If the command doesn't work, try . Disk 1 will be recovered as one complete disk. Where represent what formatting method you'd prefer. Alternatively, use .

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