How To Delete EFI Partition From USB Drive

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Sometimes when you plug in a USD drive, it shows EFI and FAT32/NTFS partition at the same time. It’s odd that if your USB is in this state, it’s better to correct the format before using it for data transfer as people might get confused by all the two new partitions shown up on their PC.

But Windows’ Disk Management doesn’t allow you to remove this partition. When going to Disk Management, right-clicking on the problematic USB drive, you will find out that all options are grayed out. You can’t Delete Volume, nor Shrink Volume nor Extend Volume to merge with other partitions.

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That’s OK. There is still another way around, command line diskpart to the rescue.

Launch Command Prompt as Administrator > type

diskpart

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Next, you want to list all the disks connected to your PC by type the below command within diskpart

list disk

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It shows all the disks currently on your system. Find the USB drive and select the disk by

select disk x(# of disk)

Here is my USB drive showing as Disk 2, so for me, I enter “select disk 2“, yours might be different.

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Next, type

clean

To wipe your disk completely clean. It’s ok if sometimes DiskPart report encountered an error: The system cannot find the file specified. See the System Event Log for more information.

As long as the Disk Management showing all unallocated data for the USB drive you have successfully wiped out the USB drive. It’s time to ready to reformat correctly this time.

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Depending on the need of your USB, FAT32 is a common universal format that is suitable for storing files across OS platforms.

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That’s it. Now your USB will no longer show two partitions when plugging into a PC. You have successfully removed the EFI partition.

42 COMMENTS

  1. ok so i took these steps, i managed to remove the EFI part from the USB flash but now when i inject the flash into the computer, it doesnt recognize it, ERROR says “please insert a disk into USB drive”

    • Go to Disk Management and scroll down, you’ll see your drive as unallocated data. Right click on it, select New Simple Volume and follow the steps.

  2. thank you for this info, but after I complete all your steps above, my flash drive won’t stop blinking, and I can’t create a simple volume (but the EFI partition is finally gone which is good). And I keep getting the message to insert a disk into the disk drive….

  3. I tried a lot of ways, the drive was with that tiny partition at the left, then i thought to myself, ” why not focus on that?”, so i googled it , landed here, followed instructions and viola, 115gb flash drive usable once again. I think the problem was someone with ubuntu had put a flash drive verion on it and it had locked it into place to stop removal, once i followed the actions here, it now is fully functioning, i formatted as exfat after new simple volume flash screen

  4. Good, it worked, however, I now face a different problem:

    When I try to create new volume in disk manager, nothing happens, I click create simple volume, but nothing, no wizard, no errors, just nothing happens, I am running disk manager as admin, and I tried unpluging the USB pluging back in, changing ports, restarting PC, nothing helped.

    Any ideas?

  5. THANKS, works for me with an vintage usb drive.
    Win10 format FAT32 didn’t work, and made the drive undetected again.
    after repeating your above instructions, slow formatted with free “”SD Card Formatter””
    voila back in business. Thanks again for the good lesson.

  6. BLESS YOU!! Great screenshots, and wow, that took me 30 seconds (at most) what was taking me multiple reboots and all kinds of crap to figure out.

    Thank-you!

    • Oh, and just want to add – I was using a 1 TB SSD – Samsung 860Q or whatever it’s called – inside of a Sabrent External USB adapter. And, it worked. Thanks again!

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