Remove and Fix Raspberry Pi SD Partitions •

I recently accidentally formatted an SD card for a Raspberry Pi that I normally use for windows. I went to reformat and lo and behold I was unable to delete the partition in Windows partition manager. I found a solution using diskpart. In about 30 seconds you will get rid of those annoying partitions that can't be removed using diskpart. I managed to remove the 75MB and 77MB partitions very easily under Windows 7 and 8.

If you are trying to figure out which hardware would work best for you, consider reading the Pi benchmarks.

Pi Unit	Processor	RAM	RAM Bus	Network	WiFi	USB	SATA	Cost
Raspberry Pi 3	1.2 GHz ARMv8 Quad Core	1 GB DDR2	450 MHz	100 Mbit	Yes	4	No	$35
Raspberry Pi 2	900 MHz ARMv7 Quad Core	1 GB DDR2	450 MHz	100 Mbit	No	4	No	$35.00
Raspberry Pi	700 MHz ARMv6 Single Core	512 MB SDRAM	400 MHz	100 Mbit	No	4	No	$25
Banana Pi	1 GHz ARMv7 Dual Core	1 GB DDR3	432 MHz	Gigabit	No	2	Yes	$36.99
Banana Pi Pro	1 GHz ARMv7 Dual Core	1 GB DDR3	432 MHz	Gigabit	Yes	2	Yes	$45.00

Remove and Fix Raspberry Pi SD Partitions in Windows

Hit Windows key + R and type diskpart

First get a list of attached disks to find the SD card

list disk

Choose the sd card that matches the SD size capacity.

Note: make sure you choose the right disk or you risk destroying your hard drive's data!

select disk 2

List the partitions

list partition

Choose the irremovable 75MB partition on the Raspberry Pi's SD card

select partition 1

Delete the 75MB Raspberry Pi partition

delete part

Now exit diskpart

exit
Now you can format the SD card normally