I have a flash drive which formerly was a bootable Rufus flash drive. In attempt to remove Rufus I created an unusable flash drive as shown in the snips from disk management shown below:
I captured snips from an identical flash drive as shown below:
I wish to have step wise instructions to make the currently useless drive useful like the good one shown in the second set of snips.
Thanks in advance for your replies.
regards,
caffeine
Unallocated means it may be partitioned but not yet formatted. You can do FAT32 [factory standard], exFAT or NTFS but if using on a Macintosh computer may be able to read NTFS but not write it without a program.
If it won't format in Disk Management try first deleting the partition then try again.
Right-click on the Start button-->Windows PowerShell (Admin).
Run the following commands one by one:
DiskPart
List disk
Select disk X(where X is the disk number of your USB device.)
Detail disk
Clean
Create partition primary size=9
Create partition primary
Format FS=NTFS quick
Assign
List partition
Select partition 1
Delete partition
Exit
The USB device will have 9 MB unallocated space followed by an NTFS partition, which occupies the rest of the storage space.
@Matthew Wai
Thanks for the detailed instructions. It worked perfectly.
During the process I noticed something which brought up a question:
Volumes 7 & 8 as letters F & G respectively are listed. Because the flash drive was formerly used as a bootable disk, does one of these volumes indicate being a mounted (virtual?) disk?
regards,
caffeine
The boot files should be on the first partition, Volume 7 in your case.
In my case, it is Volume 5 as shown below:
Why do you need the 9 MB unallocated space at the front of the drive?
I don't know if you are asking me or @Matthew Wai.
As for me, this is the formatting that shipped with the flash drive. I would like to know why drives ship that way. Is it for MBR, factory included software, or something else.
regards,
caffeine
You definitely don't need the 9 MB unallocated space. Do you want to merge it and the NTFS partition?
The simple commands for formatting a USB flash drive are:
diskpart
list disk
select disk # <-replace # with the actual number for the USB flash drive
clean <- this will erase the disk selected above, make sure it is the USB flash drive selected above!
create partition primary
format fs=fat32 quick <- see note below
active <- you can delete this command if you are never planning on booting from the flash drive
assign <- if you want the flash drive to get a specific drive letter add letter=p (or whatever letter you want)
exit
exit
Most 32GB and less flash drives are FAT32. Over 32GB you want fs=ntfs. Of course you can use ntfs on any flash drive, it's your choice.
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