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DiskPart for Cleaning Flash Drives

I often like to play around with new and different Linux distros as I am building my experience in computer and phone forensics. Mostly to see what they are like and how they could be of any use to me either now or in the future. One thing that I have found is that in doing so I have to utilize different forms of creating the bootable media, typically a USB Flash Drive. In doing so I often find that depending on how the media was created, doing a simple Windows format of the drive isn't enough to properly clean it for use with something else. Typically hidden files/folders can be left on the device, and sometimes the bootable flash drive creation process can partition the flash drive and the Windows GUI only sees one of the two partitions. Windows does have a command based tool that enables better management of drives called DiskPart (Check out their TechNet Article Here for more details). I'm going to go through a quick walk through on how to clean and format a flash drive using the DiskPart tool. One note of caution.....If you select the wrong Disk Number at the beginning of this process you could end up formatting either your primary HD or any other device connected to your PC. I recommend that you only have one flash or external HD connected to your PC when you go through this. So with that said, here we go:


  1. Open an Administrative Command Prompt
  2. Enter commands
    1. diskpart
      1. Starts the tool
    2. list disk
      1. Lists the disks that are available, you should see two 
    3. select disk <number>
      1. Where Number is the number of your USB disk, this should be the smaller of the two in size
    4. Clean
      1. This removes any existing partitions from the USB disk, including any hidden sectors
    5. Create Partition Primary
      1. Creates a new primary partition with default parameters
    6. Select Partition 1
      1. Focus on the newly created partition
    7. Active
      1. Sets the in-focus partition to active, informing the disk firmware that this is a valid system partition
    8. Format FS=<FAT, FAT32, NTFS>
      1. Select the drive file system format you want the drive to be formatted to. Typically you will use FAT or FAT32 depending on the size of the flash drive
      2. This may take some time depending on the size of the flash drive as well.
    9. Assign
    10. Exit
      1. Quits the DiskPart tool
  3. Type "exit" again to quit the command prompt or hit the red X
Now your flash drive is squeaky clean the via the Windows way. You should be able to create your bootable media without issues, or use the drive for something else.

Here's a picture in case you're not familiar with this:


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