Tech Snippet - Diskpart on Windows

Yes, this blog is not really updated. I'm sorry to be one of the masses that takes up blogging and leaves it altogether after a while.

Still, I want to keep this as a place for my occasional rant (not too many of those nowadays) and as a place to keep short technical notes that are useful to me and, hopefully, others.

With that in mind, here's one I often come across: my way of wiping disks on Windows.

Why would I do this? For me, the most prevalent use case is to reformat USB flash drives for reuse.

Short and sweet:

• Open an Administrator command prompt on Windows (cmd.exe on Start menu plus CTRL-SHIFT-ENTER).
• Start the 'diskpart' utility
• Get a list of available disks - 'list disk'
• Select the target disk - 'select disk #' (obviously substitute # for your target disk)
• Clean the disk with 'clean'
• Exit with 'exit'

OK, done. There's more that can be done with 'cleanall' (more thorough disk wiping) but for me this is sufficient.

I hope this helps others. Naturally, use it at your own risk.