If you have used your USB as a bootable device, it is likely to have a partition called EFI partition. This partition contains boot loaders, some device driver files, utility programs and data files such as error logs.
Now if you no longer want to use that USB as a boot device, EFI partition is not required. Hence, you may want to delete it to free up space and use the entire USB for storage. But to delete the EFI partition is not very straightforward. It requires you to use the command prompt, so let us learn how to do so in this article.
How to delete an EFI partition on a USB drive?
Although Disk Management can be used to manage partitions, it doesn’t let you remove the EFI partition directly. When you try to open Disk Management, you may notice that delete volume, extend or shrink volume options are all grayed out, hence disabling you from manipulating the EFI partition.
In order to resolve this problem, you can use a tool called ‘diskpart’ that is available through Command Prompt. To use ‘diskpart’ and delete EFI partition, follow the steps below.
- Click on Windows + X keys and select Command Prompt (Admin) from the list
- In the command prompt, type ‘diskpart’. This will take you to the diskpart tool
- Then type ‘list disk’ to list all the disks available in your system. From the list, identify the ‘#’ associated with your USB drive.
- Then type ‘select disk x’ (where x is the number associated with your USB drive)
- Next type ‘clean’ to clean your disk
After you execute the ‘clean’ command, sometimes you may see an error ‘The system cannot find the file specified. See the event log for more information’. This error is OK as long as your USB drive shows ‘Unallocated’ when you see it in Disk Management.
Once you see ‘Unallocated’ in Disk Management, the USB drive is ready to be formatted for a fresh start.
- Simply right-click on the area that says ‘Unallocated’ and select New Simple Volume
- Then select a name and a suitable file system like FAT32
- Once that’s selected, select Quick Format for your USB to be formatted
Once the USB drive is formatted, it will no longer contain the EFI partition. Only one partition will be created with a FAT32 file system.
Partition Recovery from a USB drive
Sometimes there are situations when your USB’s partitions get deleted. It may be due to accidental deletion, improper formatting, corrupt partition table, bad sectors, virus attacks or various other reasons.
No matter whatever the reason is, partition getting deleted means losing a lot of valuable data. In order to undo this action and recover partitions from the USB drive, you can make use of data recovery tools like Yodot. Yodot partition recovery software is a wonderful tool to recover partitions from USB drives and other storage devices such as external hard drives and SD cards.
The software provides a simple interface and allows you to recover partitions that are erased or lost. You can get your hands on the free demo version of Yodot.
