In this post I will show you how to view the list of existing partitions in Windows, delete an existing partition, create a new disk partition, and more using Windows PowerShell.
View Disk and Existing Partitions
This command will give you a list of existing partitions, their drive letters, and the disk they are associated with:
Get-Disk | Get-Partition
The information we get here is used later for deleting or creating a new partition.
Delete a Partition
To remove a partition from a specific disk, the Remove-Partition function is used. When using this function, you need to specify the disk number and the partition number. This is where information from our first command comes useful.
Remove-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -PartitionNumber 1
When you execute the command, you’ll get a prompt to confirm your action. To silently execute it, use the –confirm parameter with $false as value, like so:
Remove-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -PartitionNumber 1 -Confirm:$false
Create a Partition
To create a new partition, the New-Partition function is used. The minimum parameters this function requires are the disk number and the size of the partition. To specify the exact size, use -Size parameter with desired size as value:
New-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -Size 1GB #Available unit values: bytes, KB, MB, GB, TB
Or to use the entire available space, use -UseMaximumSize parameter:
New-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -UseMaximumSize #Use entire available space
You can also assign a specific drive letter to the new partition if you want:
New-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -UseMaximumSize -DriveLetter S
Or, automatically assign an available drive letter:
New-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -UseMaximumSize -AssignDriveLetter
Format Partition
Now that you’ve created the partition, it needs to be formatted to be usable. To do that, Format-Volume is used.
Format-Volume -DriveLetter S -FileSystem FAT32 -NewFileSystemLabel SumTips #Optional parameter: -FullFormat
Or
Get-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -PartitionNumber 1 | Format-Volume -FileSystem FAT32 -NewFileSystemLabel SumTips
Above I have used the FAT32 file system. Available file system types are: NTFS, ReFS, exFAT, FAT32, and FAT.
-NewFileSystemLabel can be used if you want to assign a label to the partition.
Resize Partition
Resize-Partition can help you out if you wanted to shrink or extend a partition:
Get-Partition -DriveLetter S | Resize-Partition -Size 50GB
More Options:
Change Partition Drive Letter
Set-Partition -DriveLetter S -NewDriveLetter T
Remove a Partition
Remove-Partition -DriveLetter S
Set/Remove Readonly flag
Set-Disk 1 -isReadOnly $true # $false to disable