Windows 7: Disk - Clean and Clean All with Diskpart Command

Hello Kusuri.


You will get a blinking cursor while the clean all is working, about an hour per 300GBs.

click to enlarge


... and this when it's finished.

Yes, give that a go and keep me informed mate.

Hmm I had the drive as unallocated space, so it seems it was working after all somehow. Hope I didn't screw anything up?

Well, at least I get a progress bar with a timer now though, 11 hours.

If it shows as unallocated space, that's what it shows as after the clean all finishes.

Yeah, but I don't think it had finished all the way though, since 11 hours hadn't passed.

Hello Kusuri,

If you got a "succeeded....." message in the command prompt like in step 7, and you show the drive as "unallocated space" as in step 9, then it has finished. All you would need to do now is step 10 to format the "unallocated space" to be able to use it.

Yeah but there was no message. I think it was still cleaning, 11h hadn't passed like WD Diag says it'll take now. Still, it really is silent. When I reformatted it showed 118 mb already in use but it was empty. Is that normal?

11 hours is a long time for this. What are the rest of your system specs? If you have a lowered powered system, then it could take longer than usual.

If you open Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc), does it show the HDD as unallocated space? Could you post a screenshot of this and of the progress bar prompt with more details (if available) expanded?

EVGA X58 SLI
Intel i7 920
Corsair HX1000 PSU

The ext HDD is connected to its own power though. It's also connected via USB and write-cache in it is off.

It shows as RAW. I had done a quick reformat and restarted the Write-Zeros, but with Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics. Still is it common for these ext HDDs to have 118 MB already used after format? I can't remember how it was the first time I got it.

RAW indicates that it's not finished yet since it should say "Unallocated Space" instead.

Since you are doing this from a program, then it could take longer since it may do more write passes. Plus, it will take longer via a USB connection since it is slower than a internal SATA or external eSATA connection.

Is the drive's activity light still on or blinking?

If you look at the "Current Sector" area in the progress dialog box, is the sector count increasing on the left side to indicate that it is actually still running?