Sometime when repairing the computers we often come across some hard drives, solid state drives or similar storage devices that have very messed up partitions and file systems. These partitions have so many problems that operating system keeps trying to fix them every time you start your PC.
In these cases, it is wise to just remove all the older partitions and clean up the hard drive. Using a free partition management software called Macrorit Partition Expert Free we can quickly clean up the hard drive and re-initialize it.
Note: This process will destroy everything on the target storage disk.
Here is how you can clean up any storage disk using Macrorit Partition Expert Free:
- Connect any storage devices that you want to clean up to your PC if not already done so.
- Download portable version of Macrorit Partition Expert Free from https://macrorit.com/partition-magic-manager/free-edition.html.
- Extract the downloaded ZIP archive to a folder and launch dm.exe from there.
- Select the target disk from the list of displayed disks carefully. Check and check again that you have selected the correct disk. Selecting the wrong disk means that you will lose all the data on that disk.
- Click on Clean Up Disk from the left side list of functions.
- Select Yes when asked in the confirmation dialog. Notice that this operation is going to remove all the partitions and put the disk back in the uninitialized state (when no file system exists).
- Once the disk has been uninitialized, it won’t be recognized by the Windows PC. So we have to initialize it once again. For this we right-click on the disk and select Initialize.
- You have to choose MBR or GPT partition type and then click on the OK button.
- Finally we have to actually make these changes by clicking on Commit button in the toolbar. This will make it carry out all the operation in exactly the same order as we selected them – remove partitions, uninitialize, re-initialize and then create a new partition.
So this is a simple way of cleaning up all the old partitions from your hard drive and start fresh with a new partition. This is really useful when you want to repurpose an old salvaged hard drive from an older PC.