fixes windows

Remove EFI Partition in Windows 7

Scenario is that you have external Hard Drive that you were using in Mac OS X as perhaps a Time Machine backup drive and you now want to erase this drive in Windows. But you find that you cannot remove the 200MB EFI System partition. Here is how:
1)On the command prompt type diskpart and answer to any possible UAC prompt.
2)On the new diskpart prompt, type list disk. Note the Disk Number column.
3) Type, select disk no. (with no. being the partition you wish to delete. Usually partition 0 and with those 200 MB of size)
4) Finish by typing, clean.
This should only take a short moment and it will be complete. There is no message letting you know this has been done. Just quit from the command prompt after a moment.
You should have a fresh hard drive ready for format and Windows use.

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10 thoughts on “Remove EFI Partition in Windows 7

  1. Thank you so much!! I am trying to use a 500gb usb hdd to put Wii games in it. The hd is preformated for Mac so I couldn't format it as wbfs. Now with your help I can clean it and do whatever I want. Thanks again for the great tip.

  2. You've confused the disk and the partition in step 3. If people want to delete the EFI partition off an external drive and follow your instructions they will have killed their boot drive!

  3. Hi Annoymous,

    When you do the list disk command you can make sure you don't delete the wrong partition.

    Thanks for the comment.

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