How to Delete EFI System Partition in Windows 10/8.1/8/7/XP/Vista

This page talks about what is an EFI system partition, why you cannot delete EFI partition in Disk Management and how to delete or remove EFI system partition in Windows 10/8/7/XP/Vista with Diskpart command line.

Usually, you can easily delete a partition in Disk Management. But sometimes, you can’t remove EFI system partition in Windows 10/8.1/8/7/XP/Vista because “Delete Volume” feature is grayed out. And you may encounter the similar situation when you trying to delete OEM partition, recovery partitions, system reserved partition. This page will talk about what is an EFI system partition and how to remove, deleted or format EFI system partition in Windows 10/8.1/8/7/XP/Vista.

What is an EFI system partition and why you cannot delete it?

Usually, when you successfully install Windows OS on a GPT disk of your computer, an EFI system partition (ESP for short) will be created. But what is an EFI system partition?

Deleting EFI system partition will cause installed systems unbootable. So, EFI system partition is usually protected and locked by the Windows operating systems to prevent and avoid accidental deletion of these partitions. That’s why you can’t delete EFI partition using Disk Management tool. But in some special situation, for example, when you uninstalling Windows system, you might want to remove EFI system partition to free up some disk space. At this moment, how can you delete EFI system partition? Actually, there are two ways to do this job.  And in case something goes wrong after the operation, we recommend you to clone EFI partition to make a backup.

Method 1. How to delete EFI partition with Diskpart

Step 1. Hit “Windows Key + R to open the run dialogue box, enter “diskpart” and click “OK” to open a black command prompt window. (run with administrator)

Step 2. Type “list disk” to display all the disks of your computer. Type “select disk n” to identify which disk you need to work with. Here n stands for the disk letter.

Step 3. Type “list partition” to display all the volumes on the hard drive. Type “select partition n” to identify which partition you want to remove. Here n stands for the volume letter.

Step 4. type clean and it will erase everything. then you should re-initialized the disk

On September 7, 2018   /   Hardware   /   Leave a comment