Cannot Wipe Secondary HDD

[Birblover12]

I'm trying to wipe my secondary hard drive because I did a clean install of windows on my main M.2 NVMe drive and would like to wipe the hard drive, however, when I go into my Admin account and try to format it, it pops up with errors along the lines of "An application is using files from this drive, close those applications and try again." I made sure no other accounts are open, and the only other processes open are ones from the C-Drive (I checked Task Manager) so how exactly do I wipe it? 

 

I tried both File Explorer's method (going to "My PC --> format") and Disk Partition Manager's method and neither worked (disk partition's format button was greyed out, I.E un-clickable) so not sure what to do.

 

How do I fix this?

[KaitouX]

The easiest way to do it in my opinion is to create a Linux bootable pendrive using Ventoy or Rufus, and format from there. Manjaro, Ubuntu or Fedora all should work fine, but double check that there's actually nothing using it, or you could break something on Windows.

Having a bootable pendrive is also pretty helpful in general for troubleshooting, Ventoy in particular allows for multiple ISOs in the same pendrive, so you can keep a Windows ISO too if you ever need it to fix/reinstall Windows.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

31 minutes ago, Birblover12 said:

I'm trying to wipe my secondary hard drive because I did a clean install of windows on my main M.2 NVMe drive and would like to wipe the hard drive, however, when I go into my Admin account and try to format it, it pops up with errors along the lines of "An application is using files from this drive, close those applications and try again." I made sure no other accounts are open, and the only other processes open are ones from the C-Drive (I checked Task Manager) so how exactly do I wipe it? 

 

I tried both File Explorer's method (going to "My PC --> format") and Disk Partition Manager's method and neither worked (disk partition's format button was greyed out, I.E un-clickable) so not sure what to do.

 

How do I fix this?

Boot into the Windows installation and press Shift + F10 to open the Command Prompt. From there you can open "diskpart", and "list disk" to help identify the disk number given to the secondary drive based on the drive capacity. Use "select disk 1" (replace 1 with whichever drive number identified in the previous step) to select that disk and "clean" to clear all partitions on that drive. From there, you can restart and create a new partition when booted back into Windows. 

[Birblover12]

8 minutes ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

Boot into the Windows installation and press Shift + F10 to open the Command Prompt. From there you can open "diskpart", and "list disk" to help identify the disk number given to the secondary drive based on the drive capacity. Use "select disk 1" (replace 1 with whichever drive number identified in the previous step) to select that disk and "clean" to clear all partitions on that drive. From there, you can restart and create a new partition when booted back into Windows. 

My issue is that it looks like there's an EFI partition along with a "Recovery Partition", and I'm unclear if this is connected to my main SSD boot drive or not, since the main SSD doesn't have a recovery partition it looks like.

 

Would that be an issue at all?

[Alex Atkin UK]

27 minutes ago, Birblover12 said:

My issue is that it looks like there's an EFI partition along with a "Recovery Partition", and I'm unclear if this is connected to my main SSD boot drive or not, since the main SSD doesn't have a recovery partition it looks like.

 

Would that be an issue at all?

Could be, its best to remove all other drives when doing a clean install as I think if the installer sees an existing EFI partition it will use that instead of creating a new one.