This post will cover how to delete an OEM Partition. OEM partitions can be made by Dell or Lenovo. If you use the GUI Disk Management tools you’ll notice you can’t delete the OEM Partition. In order to delete the OEM partition you are going to need to use a command line tool called Diskpart.
First of all this is probably what you are currently looking at:
If you hit “DELETE” on the OEM Partition you can’t delete it like other partitions. If you right click on the OEM partition you will notice you don’t have the same options.
Normally you’d see:
To delete the OEM partition you are going to need to hit “Windows Key” + “R”. This will open the run dialogue box. Type “diskpart” and hit “OK”.
This will open a black command prompt like window. Type “list disk”. This will display all the disks.
You can verify which disk you want to edit using the “Disk Management Tools”. The Disk management tools can be found by Right Clicking Computer and selecting “Management”.As you can tell from the first screen shot in this post the OEM partition is located on Disk 2.
You must now select the disk with the OEM partition on it. Again in my case it is “Disk 2”. To select the disk you must type “select disk 2”.
You can now type “list partition” to list all the partitions on the disk just in case you want to verify you absolutely have the right disk selected.
You must now select the partition. In my case it is “Partition 1”. To do this you must type the command “select partition 1”.
Now type “delete partition override”.
Once you do that you have officially removed the OEM partition on the drive! Congratulations!
Shumayl Arshad says
thanks. worked like a charm
Colin Stafford says
Excellent instructions; easy to follow. Allowed me to free up 5 GB of unknown OEM stuff on an Acer laptop. Thanks, Jared!!
squirrel says
You save me !
Hugo says
Great guide. Thank you
Charlie says
I keep getting this response when trying the final step:
The specified command or parameters are not supported on this system.
Any help in this matter? ideas?
Charlie says
I stumbled upon some older comments I did not see before about converting to the partition to basic but this also did not help. In the end I started to get frustrated and read the help menu in diskpart. I ended up selecting the disk and running the command “clean” Then I was able to add a volume and format the whole drive and now have no partitions 🙂 Thanks for your article. It pointed me in the right direction 🙂
Etienne says
Nice stuff !
Larry says
Very nice tutorial. Worked like a charm! Thanks!
Wj says
Hi Guys,
I followed all steps listed but the command window did not show all my partitions but only listed C:, at least I can see my D: overthere and plus a unamed primary(I named it after,but still not showing) partition and a OEM partition.
I could not find out what I was doing wrong, I just wanted to delete either the OEM or the unamed primary one.
I am running windows 7 64 and working on a Lenovo Ideapad V570. As I have got 4 partition so I could not create one more, but I do need one more other D: for my data backup.
Please helep….Thanks in millions!
jannes says
Thank you. I works Great!!!! no need to install any other programs!!!!!!
Dave says
Fantastic guide, helped me reclaim missing space from my 750GB portable hard disk.
abhishek says
thank you very much sir . i was really disturb . thank you for your help.
Wilson Chan says
Thanks for this Jared. Great and clear instruction.
Ryan says
Thank you very much for posting this!
We just bought a new desktop PC with a 1 TB hard drive, and after one week I was looking at the properties for the C: partition and noticed that it only had 60 GB left! So I opened Disk Management and saw that Asus had configured a 768GB OEM Drive! Needless to say, I am not able to access this drive or use the space in any way (I wonder why in the heck they had to use 3/4 of my hard drive for OEM purposes – a little excessive?), but I am going to give this a shot and reclaim my hard drive.
Thanks again, you’ve saved me 768 GB!
RamNemesis says
2013 and this is still needed?
Got an extra 5gb now.
great thanks alot for the time and effort.
Dave P. says
Thanks. Great tutorial. Definite bookmark material.
Thad says
Jared Heinrichs procedure for “overriding” partition deletion protection was accurate and organized for ready use.
Top drawer work!
Thanks Mr. Heinrichs
Sandman192 says
I just deleted all the partitions and had the OEM to deal with and this helped me allot. When I went to command prompt and deleted the OEM and went back to Computer Management and I had the hole Unallocated drive and the OEM is gone. This is great if you buy an refurbished drive and they didn’t clean it before the resold it.
sureshkanna says
thanks its working fine……………
Oskar says
Thanks! =)
stealth says
Just a Thank you
stockstradr says
Thank you! Great guide
mahesh says
Thanks for the awesome post
withfries2 says
Thanks for the instructions, super helpful this weekend while helping my mother in law refresh her aging PC with a SSD.
Pasi says
Excellent article. Thank you, good Sir.
Vishal says
Thank you so much for this great help 🙂
yabesh says
Thank you verymuch….. sir
saley says
Thanks man very cool and simple…. also i like to use cmd!
Azeem says
Wooowwww… thanks a lot Mr.
I had little bit tension about this before.
It’s a very good tutorial for me… I have deleted my OEM Partition according to your instructions.
Thanks
Richard Wale says
Excellent – I wanted to use the original Dell C Drive as an additional non-bootable drive, so did not need/want the OEM partition.
Very simple instructions, worked superbly, thanks very much indeed!
Jen Chambers says
THANK YOU SO MUCH!
This really was a huge help, my SSD had crashed on my ASUS notebook and when I got it back I found an OEM partition that I was unable to uninstall, which left me with just little over 18gb of space. Not enough to install Windows. So thanks so much! You saved my SSD!
-Jen Chambers
Chris says
Nicely written, Jared.
very easy to follow.
thanks
Dave says
Excellent instructions, thanks!
R says
Thanks. Very helpful.
ifti says
wow
worked first time!
thanks for this
Samay says
Is there a way to recover my data from OEM partition.
I don’t know how but I accidently changed my 100 gb disk drive into an oem partition. I cannot delete the partition as it contains important documents n files.
Carlos says
Thanks man for sharing. Helped out.
Saqib says
HI
great …….. can you help me in my problem ….
I recover my dell inspiron with win 8 to factory image before recovery I had four drives C for OS, D for WinRE, F and G for my data. after recovery it is now showing only C, D and G as F. disk management tool is showing my previous F drive 146 GB as OEM partition with 96 GB free space amount similar to my old data . can I recover this OEM partition back with data ????????????? please need help
CHUNKY says
U ARE GREAT… I REALLY PISSED OFF SEARCHING VARIOUS WEBSITES…AFTER FORMATTING MY 210GB DATA SHOWING IN OEM…GREAT JOB.
Zver1248 says
Спасибо Большое вы очень помогли !!!!
hobzzz says
You are the man Jared!!!!
Worked like a charm!
Roger says
Thanks – much appreciated.
pema says
Delete?????
If we delete the omc partion then would we that amount of space back on laptop????
oneye says
Nice! Worked for me 🙂
Ron Modesitt says
Works great. Many thanks.
Sanjay_K says
Thank you so much….
Gunther says
Thanks a lot, worked for me on a WD Raptor, with a Dell OEM XP partition. It’s gone 🙂
mauirixxx says
many years later, this guide is still helpful, thanks 😀
raf_qpsk says
Great Howto! Really help me out.
Thanks alot.
Rafael says
Thank you very much!!!
I used Dell recovery tool to restore my system to original state, and then the 500gb partition I used to store data simply turned into OEM.
It was driving me crazy and this guide solved my problem perfectly!