Windows will not allow me to re-format a drive E:

[Walter]

Windows 7 Pro

I have 3 physical drives in my pc
C: Has Windows applications on.
D: Has all my data on.
E: Has assorted files on.

I want to re-format E: but when I select Computer Management and the select Disk Management and right click E: Format option is greyed out.
Any idea how I can format e:

 

[Bongo]

You may want to try Partition Wizard Best Free Partition Manager Freeware and free partition magic for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Vista and Windows XP 32 bit & 64 bit. MiniTool Free Partition Manager Software Home Edition. it is free and you can make a bootable CD or flash drive with it also.

Jerry

 

[pscowboy]

You could also try diskpart.

Type the following in an elevated command prompt (run as admin):

diskpart
list disk (note your E drive #, and use it in next entry. Go by size to get it right)
select disk #
clean

When it completes, type exit and see if you can now initialize and format in disk mgr.

 

[Walter]

You may want to try Partition Wizard Best Free Partition Manager Freeware and free partition magic for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Vista and Windows XP 32 bit & 64 bit. MiniTool Free Partition Manager Software Home Edition. it is free and you can make a bootable CD or flash drive with it also.

Jerry

Thanks for the suggestion but it did not allow me to format drive E:

I removed the drive E: from my Windows 7 pc and put it in my new pc which is running Windows 8 and I was allowed to format my drive

 

[Walter]

You may want to try Partition Wizard Best Free Partition Manager Freeware and free partition magic for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Vista and Windows XP 32 bit & 64 bit. MiniTool Free Partition Manager Software Home Edition. it is free and you can make a bootable CD or flash drive with it also.

Jerry

You could also try diskpart.

Type the following in an elevated command prompt (run as admin):

diskpart
list disk (note your E drive #, and use it in next entry. Go by size to get it right)
select disk #
clean

When it completes, type exit and see if you can now initialize and format in disk mgr.

Thanks for the suggestion but it did not allow me to format drive E: but
I removed the drive E: from my Windows 7 pc and put it in my new pc which is running Windows 8 and I was allowed to format my drive

 

[AddRAM]

If you would have posted a shot of disk management we could have told you why you couldn`t format it, but glad you got it sorted.

 

[gregrocker]

Since it apparently isn't clear to you, we must see the labels on each partition to be able to tell you why Disk Mgmt won't allow formatting. It is most often because it holds the System Boot files, for which the fix is to move them to the correct partition. We handle these here every day, thousands of times since Win7 was released.

 

[Walter]

Since it apparently isn't clear to you, we must see the labels on each partition to be able to tell you why Disk Mgmt won't allow formatting. It is most often because it holds the System Boot files, for which the fix is to move them to the correct partition. We handle these here every day, thousands of times since Win7 was released.

The drive that I wanted re-format was drive E: which just holds data files (Word doc and Excel xls) not Windows so there were no Windows system files at all.

Any way as I said I put the drive into my new Windows 8 pc and I was able to re-format it inDisk Mgmt.