Windows 7 Diskpart ( clean all ) not working

[AmjiBhai]

I wanted to prevent windows 7 installer from creating a reserved partition of 100mb space. Why ? Because i had to comply with certain standard operating procedures .

Soon after the installation i used diskpart and deleted the volume which contained the windows bcd files.

Then i used " clean all " command which took so long time that i had to press ctrl+c to interrupt .

Looking forward to your kind help....please.

 

[Ian]

The "clean all" command takes a very long time as it does the following:

Specifies that each and every byte\sector on the disk is set to zero, which completely deletes all data contained on the disk.

It's very time consuming as it has to overwrite all of the data on the disk, making it harder to recover with data recovery tools. If you want a faster method, you can just use "clean" which doesn't take long at all (but your data could theoretically be recoverable). I always just use "clean".

BTW, if you use "clean" or "clean all", it'll wipe everything off that disk - including the main Windows 7 partition.

 

[AmjiBhai]

Thanks ian i will try clean . then after that can i format the partition in order to reinstall Windows 7? I want the bcd store to take place in C drive not in any reserved partition.

 

[Ian]

Yep, once the disk is cleaned then you'll need to create a partition and format it. I'm not sure how Windows 7 works on install, but I think that if you create a single maximum size partition that takes up the whole disk, it won't try and re-create the 100MB partition. Worth a try .

Just be aware that by running "clean" you'll lose everything on that disk (I'm sure you know this, but want to repeat this in case anyone else reads this thread in the future).

 

[IttechGyan]

I just finished cleaning my HDD of 500GB with Diskpart's "Clean All" command. It took between 24 to 40 hours, I can't tell exactly because I left my laptop in the evening and returned in the morning. This was in a cmd window in Hiren's BootCD 15.2 environment, running from the CD, in a Lenovo G550 laptop (3GB RAM, Intel Core2Duo 2.1GHz). My HDD had some bad sectors in it and I couldn't install Windows, so I don't know how much it would have taken if I did this on an installed Windows environment.

I too almost cancelled the operation because I was frustrated with the extremely long time it took, but it did finish the process in the end.