Drive will not wipe/erase

[paulhar]

Hello,
I am running windows 7 and have a 500gb drive with two partitions. I have been unable to wipe the seconadry partition using both free and paid for drive cleaning utilities. I t looks like its working as while it's running the number of bytes used on the disk is decreasing, but after the system restarts everything nothing on the drive has changed -everything is still there!

 

[PhilFrisbie]

What have you tried?

 

[WyomingKnott]

I have three thoughts on this
1) If you don't have anything that should be using that partition, and the partition is in use, it may be malware. On the other hand, it might just be the indexer scanning the drive. Up to you whether or not you want to look into the cause.

2) You could try booting Win7 into Safe mode (F8 during the boot screen, then choose safe mode). This reduces the number of things that run in the background and might allow you to delete the partition.

3) The most violent solution is to get a bootable partition utility. Boot to that and not to Windows, and whatever was using the drive won't be there. If you still can't delete the partition, then you have some other kind of problem.

Are you absolutely sure that there is nothing on the second partition that you need?

 

[shabaa]

1. You could delete the partition using the disk manager in windows and then go and create a new formatted blank partition and all data in the old partition will be gone.

2. You could use a disk utility like Acronis disk director and deal with it as well.

Both of these options can create a new blank, formatted partition in the place of your old one.