Unable to Delete Partitions

[mpicione]

I recently added a M.2 SSD drive to my laptop, cloned my existing hard drive to it, and then set the new drive as the boot device. It is working great. I'd like to delete the partitions, but when I go into the Disk Management section of Computer Management, and right click the drives, all of the options are either missing from the fly out menu, or grayed out depending on which partition I select. Why is this, and how do I overcome it? I'd like the old drive to just be one large partition/drive for storing files.

[Huffer]

So you want to delete the partitions on the original drive? Yes, Windows disk management GUI will not allow you to delete certain kinds of system partitions. You have to use diskpart from the command line and "clean" the disk to remove all partition structure then re-initialize it format it and mount it as a lettered drive. 

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/85819-erase-disk-using-diskpart-clean-command-windows-10-a.html

It can take a couple hours to do a clean all on a 1 TB drive. Let it run. When the diskpart cleaning is finished, reboot and use disk management which will show a big unallocated space which you can then initialize, format and mount. 

Post back with any more questions and please accept as solution if this is the info you needed. 

[mpicione]

Hi! This definitely got rid of the partitions and allowed me to setup a new one, thank you. Unfortunately, the computer stopped booting after that. Not sure why, the drive was perfectly cloned and setup as the boot device in the BIOS. No matter, I did a fresh install of Windows and everything is great. Thanks.

[Huffer]

Yeah sometimes Windows install will put one of the boot partitions on the hard drive even when an SSD is also present. Possible it could have been fixed with a repair using fixmbr and fixboot and been able to boot off SSD. Glad it all worked out.