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# How to delete a protected EFI disk partition with Windows 7 or 8 or 8.1
- URL: https://blog.jsinh.in/how-to-delete-a-protected-efi-disk-partition-with-windows-7-or-8-or-8-1/
- Published: 2014-08-10T17:01:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-07T15:10:28.000Z
- Author: Jsinh
- Tags: #Import 2026-10-04 19:16

I recently bought a MAC Mini for development purposes and learning cross-platform / Xamarin development.

Being windows / linux user for a quite long time now, I haven't ever touched or operated MAC OS before (I know, shame on me). So I have no prior experience with MAC world what so ever.

In excitement, I opted for beta testing for early release of MAC OSX - Yosemite and was happy to use it. But when I experienced that my Xcode and Xamarin studio started breaking and acted weirdly, I decided to downgrade back to MAC OSX Mavericks.

It was not an easy thing for me at first, after a few runs and tries I figured out a way to do it. This involved in preparing a flash drive to fresh install MAC OSX using recovery options.

I prepared a flash drive with instruction from Apple and other developers and was successful to restore my Mavericks to continue.

Now when I plug my flash drive used for above restore in windows, I found that my flash drive was having a partition named **EFI System Partition**. I was able to delete other volumes / partitions of that flash drive but all options on this partition were disabled.

![Delete EFI partition on windows](https://blob.jsinh.in/media/2014/08/10/SS01-Delete+EFI+Partition+on+Windows.png)

So after bit of googling with Bing, I found a way on how to format partition of my flash drive.

**Step:** Open command prompt (as administrator) and type `DISKPART` which will open `DISKPART` command window.

![Open DISKPART command line utility](https://blob.jsinh.in/media/2014/08/10/SS02-OpenDiskpart-New.png)

**Step:** Next get list of your disk currently online using `LIST DISK` command

![List disk - Diskpart](https://blob.jsinh.in/media/2014/08/10/SS03-ListDisk-Diskpart.png)

Here you can see, the flash drive that is having the EFI system partition is labeled as `DISK 3`.

**Step:** Select the flash drive disk number. In my case, I selected using following command:

`SELECT Disk 3`

It will output following message - `Disk 3 is now the selected disk.`

![Select disk - Diskpart](https://blob.jsinh.in/media/2014/08/10/SS04-SelectDisk-Diskpart.png)

**Step:** Type the following command - `CLEAN` and you will receive output as - `DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.`.

**Note (Imp):** Please make sure you have selected the right disk as this change cannot be undone. This command will erase all partitions on that disk.

You can exit out of `DISKPART` by typing `EXIT` on command prompt.

Now when you go back to DISK MANAGEMENT window, you will observe that your flash disk is all good to create your partitions again.

![Flash drive - ready for partitions](https://blob.jsinh.in/media/2014/08/10/SS05-FlashDrive-ReadyForPartitioning.png)