Formatting a drive in Windows is normally done through some version of Disk Management. However, sometime you will run into a hard drive or USB stick that has partitions that you cannot delete from the Disk Management tools.

To fully format a drive in Windows 7/8/2008/2012, we need to launch the command line

1. Run cmd.exe as an Administrator
2. Run diskpart
3. Now type: list disk
4. From the list, you need to very, very carefully find the drive that you want to wipe out
5. Now type: select disk x where x is the number of the disk
6. Now type: clean
7. Now type: exit
8. You can now use your regular Disk Management tools to format or partition your hard drive or USB stick