I've got two hard drives in a system, one of which (disk 1) is the Windows boot disk, and the other (disk 0) has a partition (partition 1) that I'd like to format with NTFS. However, Disk Management won't let me; the option is greyed out. Diving into diskpart tells me that I cannot format the partition as NTFS because there is no volume selected. When I go to list the volumes to see which one to select, I see that none of them are what I want to format.
DISKPART> list disk
Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 1863 GB 0 B *
Disk 1 Online 232 GB 35 GB <-- This is the boot disk
DISKPART> select disk 0
Disk 0 is now the selected disk.
DISKPART> list partition
Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
Partition 1 Unknown 500 GB 1024 KB <-- Format this one
Partition 2 Unknown 1363 GB 500 GB
DISKPART> select partition 1
Partition 1 is now the selected partition.
DISKPART> format fs=ntfs quick
There is no volume selected.
Please select a volume and try again.
DISKPART> list volume
Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
Volume 0 System Rese NTFS Partition 350 MB Healthy System
Volume 1 C Root NTFS Partition 116 GB Healthy Boot
DISKPART> detail disk
ST2000DM001-1ER164
Disk ID: {DFD83667-1983-40B6-9EE3-03AFDD902518}
Type : SATA
Status : Online
Path : 1
Target : 0
LUN ID : 0
Location Path : PCIROOT(0)#PCI(1F02)#ATA(C01T00L00)
Current Read-only State : No
Read-only : No
Boot Disk : No
Pagefile Disk : No
Hibernation File Disk : No
Crashdump Disk : No
Clustered Disk : No
There are no volumes.
Neither of the listed volumes are 500 GB, which is the size of the partition that I want to format.
Best Answer
First, fire up Disk Management and delete the partition to create some unallocated space where it was.
Screenshot of Disk Management with 500GB of unallocated space where the partition was:
Next, right click the empty space and create a simple volume where it was. When prompted to format it as NTFS, answer yes.
Screenshot of formatting dialog:
Once that's finished, the newly created volume should be ready to use.