Diskpart is a very useful tool, not only for diagnosing problems, but also fixing them. Diskpart is an application that can be started via command prompt or by starting the app separately. If starting diskpart via Command Prompt, open a command prompt window and type “diskpart” and then hit enter. Diskpart grants access to a different set of commands which can be used to manipulate the hard disks in a windows-based computer. The capabilities of diskpart are very extensive and will require not a small amount of personal investigation in order to fully understand and utilize the program.
The basic commands for diskpart deal with viewing all of the disks within a computer. There are 4 different types of device which can be seen and manipulated with diskpart, Disks, Volumes, Partitions and Virtual Disks. In order to see a list of all of any kind of device in a computer, type “list” followed by the type of device, e.g., “list disk” in order to see all of the disks. Another basic command is “active”, which marks the current partition as the working device. This means that any commands used to change a partition will be used on the “active” partition. The active command can only be used on a partition which is marked with a “*” in the list. Notice that you need to select the partition that you wish to mark active by using the command “select” which can be shortened to “sel” to save time.
Now that we can select and mark devices as active, we can add and delete partitions and disks. The commands for completing these tasks are fairly intuitive, and simply typing “add/delete and then a device will do this for the active or selected device. When creating a new partition or disk, a letter must be assigned to the device. In order to do so, type “assign=*” where the * is the letter that you wish to assign to the drive. Note that you cannot assign a new letter to a volume which is being used for an operating system such as the boot volume, the system volume or the volume which contains a paging file.