Windows 8.1 – Cannot Format Partition as NTFS: “There are no volumes”

hard driventfspartitioningwindows

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:

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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:

enter image description here

Once that's finished, the newly created volume should be ready to use.

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