Recover Broken Drives
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Sometimes, things might go wrong, and you end up with a half-flashed drive that is unusable by your operating systems, and common graphical tools might even refuse to get it back to a normal state. To solve these kinds of problems, we've collected a list of fail-proof methods to completely erase your drive in major operating systems.
Windows
In Windows, we'll use diskpart, a command line utility tool that comes pre-installed in all modern Windows versions.
- Open cmd.exe from either the list of all installed applications, or from the "Run..." dialog usually accessible by pressing Ctrl+X.
- Type diskpart.exe and press "Enter". You'll be asked to provide administrator permissions, and a new prompt window will appear. The following commands should be run in the new window.
- Run list disk to list the available drives. Take note of the number id that identifies the drive you want to clean.
- Run select disk N, where N corresponds to the id from the previous step.
- Run clean. This command will completely clean your drive by erasing any existent filesystem.
- Run create partition primary. This command will create a new partition.
- Run active. This command will active the partition.
- Run list partition. This command will show available partition.
- Run select partition N, where N corresponds to the id of the newly available partition.
- Run format override quick. This command will format the partition. You can choose a specific formatting by adding FS=xx where xx could be NTFS or FAT or FAT32 after format. Example : format FS=NTFS override quick
- Run exit to quit diskpart.