News How to Delete the EFI System Partition in Windows 10 or 11

[brian532]

I think he using wrong command, probably wanted select.

I think that is it. When I used select I was able to follow the rest of the steps. The EFI partition is still there but now there is an * by it. Maybe a reboot will finish the job. How did he get set to work in the article when that is the wrong command, at least on my win10?

 

[maik80]

To save 100MB ? Serious

 

[wjlesaulnier]

Windows boot drives automatically have an EFI system partition for boot info that's nearly impossible to erase.

How to Delete the EFI System Partition in Windows 10 or 11 : Read more

There is a small syntax mistake in the instructions- instead of "set disk" it should be "sel disk".

 

[wjlesaulnier]

This is such a clickbait article. So much so that even the admin had to post a quick disclaimer. You can't remove the EFI partition from a Windows boot drive. So if you have an old "boot drive" lying around that you now want to use for data, this probably would work? But in that case, you'd erase the entire physical drive anyway. Jeez.

The boot partition is locked and you can't delete it in the usual way.
I play around with various Linux distros aside from my main Windows machine. I use this method to delete locked boot partitions so I can repurpose a SSD or flash drive frequently.

 

[wjlesaulnier]

I keep getting this error --

DISKPART> list disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 931 GB 1024 KB *
Disk 1 Online 2794 GB 28 MB *
Disk 2 Online 3726 GB 0 B *
Disk 3 Online 931 GB 1024 KB

DISKPART> set disk 1

The arguments specified for this command are not valid.
For more information on the command type: HELP SETID

DISKPART> set disk1

The arguments specified for this command are not valid.
For more information on the command type: HELP SETID

It should be "sel disk" instead of "set disk".

 

[m610]

I have an external drive that I am trying to reconfigure to use in Win 8 and older systems. I tried the procedure describe above and got an error message.

Below is the screenshot of what I tried using diskpart.

I get the same error message when I try to delete partition 2.

I couldn't find anything about the error in the event log, but I might not have been looking in the right place

Below is a screenshot of disk manager.

Any clues as what to do next?

Thanks in advance, Mike

 

[alteredego]

It should be "sel disk" instead of "set disk".

This is correct, just wasted a few minutes before I noticed that he even changes the command to 'sel' in the second screenshot! Must have been quite the deadline. Is there a way to have him fix the article?

 

[cyber_drift]

In case this helps anyone else, the correct command for selecting the disk (step 3) is:

SELECT DISK {disk_number}

The instructions list this as SET DISK {disk_number} and another user has also reported a problem with the instructions as written.

 

[Deleted member 14196]

And this is the wrong kind of article to be publishing on a site like this. Basically showing users how to royally screw up their system really quickly. There’s no reason to remove 100 MB partition. None whatsoever that space is infinitesimally, small and useless and there’s no reason to remove it unless this is a data drive, and you can just format the damn thing anyway.

 

[cyber_drift]

And this is the wrong kind of article to be publishing on a site like this. Basically showing users how to royally screw up their system really quickly. There’s no reason to remove 100 MB partition. None whatsoever that space is infinitesimally, small and useless and there’s no reason to remove it unless this is a data drive, and you can just format the damn thing anyway.

To be fair on the author, I found this article useful. I couldn't see an option to format a drive I had used for Linux. The EFI partition was around 500MB and it was annoying me. Formatting the whole drive was the solution I was looking for, but this article served its purpose.

 

[Deleted member 14196]

To be fair on the author, I found this article useful. I couldn't see an option to format a drive I had used for Linux. The EFI partition was around 500MB and it was annoying me. Formatting the whole drive was the solution I was looking for, but this article served its purpose.

You needed room to store one TV episode? And that TV episode would be DVD quality for 500 MB. Seems useless to me.

you don’t need articles like this you have Google there’s a wealth of information out there on how to do this. Most users on this site are newbies and they don’t require this at all.

 

[Colif]

Most users on this site are newbies and they don’t require this at all.

Assumes Mandark meant to say aren't... although I may have missed the change.