Format EFI Partition system

You might have always noticed that your hard disk label shows much more capacity than what you actually get. For example,  The laptop I bought few months ago came with a configuration of 1TB of hard disk. However after opening it, I saw only 931GB of available space. Though I knew that there are always some memory space which are reserved and which cannot be used but this was a lot of space.

Hence to be more sure if where the space was actually been used, I launched my Disk Management tool.

To open Disk Management Tool in windows 8 or 8.1 just type disk management and open any of the option saying create or delete partition and anything similar. In windows 7 open start menu and type in the search box Disk Management.

Universal way for all Mentioned OS, just open run and type compmgmt.msc and click ok.

Now once I opened my disk management tool, I saw two EFI partition, which I created when I once installed Ubuntu on my system. The two counted for 24GB of space. Since I was not running Ubuntu on my system anymore, The EFI partition was not doing any good to me. Hence I though to get rid of them.

Being marked as System Partition, Due to EFI type, Windows won’t allow the deletion or modification of these partitions. Hence I figured out yet another way to get rid of them. This is the simplest way I found after searching for a long time on the web and passing through a number of things which seemed a lot high-tech.

Below are the steps on how to Format EFI System Partition.

1. Launch your disk management tool to verify if you have any EFI type partition or not.
2. Make sure you verify for the correct EFI partition system which you want to delete and not the EFI partition system which contains Windows Boot Information. Anyways, even if you do, Windows won’t allow you deleting the Windows partition.
3. We will be using CMD [Command Prompt] for this as you cannot do this via the normal menu options. Hence launch RUN and type in CMD. Then click on RUN.
4. Once CMD is open. Type in DISKPART . A list of internal and external Hard Disk Connected would popup in CMD. Identify the Hard Disk which has the EFI partition system you want to delete. Once you get the number of that Disk suppose 0, Type in CMD – SELECT DISK 0.
5. Once the disk is selected, Type in LIST PART to show all the partition in the selected disk. Once it shows ups the partitions, verify for the position of the partition which you want to delete. For example if the EFI partition system is 1, then type SELECT PART 1 . For 2 type SELECT PART 2 and so on.
6. It will mention the selected partition as active. Now to delete the partition type DELETE PART OVERRIDE or you may even type DELETE PARTITION OVERRIDE .
7. As already mentioned, if the partition you selected to delete does not has any boot files which is needed by OS, then it will be deleted successfully.

Once the partition is deleted, Open up your disk management tool and now the EFI partition would be showing as UNALLOCATED SPACE.

To create a new partition, right click on that space, Choose the desired option and Click OK. Once you are done creating a new partition, Launch My computer and you can see that partition listed there with other local drives.