Best way to wipe old windows boot drive?

[lemonhope135]

I recently added a new nvme drive to my pc and decided to make it my new boot drive. I did a fresh install of win10 on it and saved all the important files from the old boot drive. How do I now completely format the old boot drive to make it into a simple volume storage drive in windows?

[Dukesilver27-]

Format the whole drive partitions, then merge them with software.

https://www.howtogeek.com/235348/how-to-combine-multiple-partitions-into-a-single-partition/

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

26 minutes ago, lemonhope135 said:

I recently added a new nvme drive to my pc and decided to make it my new boot drive. I did a fresh install of win10 on it and saved all the important files from the old boot drive. How do I now completely format the old boot drive to make it into a simple volume storage drive in windows?

Go into Disk Management and lookup the drive letter for the drive you want to use as a storage device. So let's pretend disk 1 in my case just because that has multiple partitions (ignore the fact it's my boot drive, just imagine this was drive D:, your old boot drive).

 

 

Then go into Command Prompt and enter the following commands

diskpart
list disk

 

Verify disk 1 is the drive you want to delete then select it by using:

select disk 1

If it's not disk 1, replace it with which ever disk number is listed. So disk 0, disk 2, etc. 

 

Now use clean to wipe the drive of all partitions, create a new partition, then select that newly created partition. 

clean
create part pri
select part 1

 

Spoiler

Optional:

If you want to secure wipe or zero out the drive so no data can be recovered, you can add the all flag on the clean command. This will take much longer to complete but will remove all partitions zero and out the drive completely. 

clean all

 

 

Now you want to format the partition and assign it a drive letter. Once done, you can use the disk as mass storage. 

format fs=ntfs quick
assign

[Eliel]

Do what @BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said. It's the best way,

[Helpful Tech Witch]

22 minutes ago, lemonhope135 said:

I recently added a new nvme drive to my pc and decided to make it my new boot drive. I did a fresh install of win10 on it and saved all the important files from the old boot drive. How do I now completely format the old boot drive to make it into a simple volume storage drive in windows?

if you want to fully clean it, you can just use a built in windows utility.

Open the command prompt, with administrator privileges.
Type "diskpart" and hit enter.
type "list disk" hit enter.
Find your disk, make note of the number is asigned on the left.
next type "select disk n" where n is the number of the disk. Make sure you have the right disk selected.
Next type "clean"
Your disk should now be wiped.
Next, go to Disk Management. You cand find it by typing Disk management in the windows menu, it will be called "creat and format disk partitions" or similar
FInd the drive that you wiped, it should be the one with a black bar.
Right click, and hit initialize.
From there follow the directions
Then once it is done, right click, select "create partition" then folow the dirrections

There you go, your disk is useable.