Tin Kuri asks:
Yesterday I plugged my 8GB pen drive into the USB port to make an Open SuSE live USB stick using the Open SuSE image file and image writer. After that I booted several times with this USB stick but now when I want to remove everything on it and try to format it so that I can use it like before as a normal pen drive, it’s not happening.
Whenever I connect it to PC it says “you need to format the disk in drive before you can use it”. When I try to format, it shows the disk capacity as 662MB which is the Linux image filesize and not the original size of 8GB. How do I format the pen drive and start using it like before?
Thanks for any advice.
7 Answers -
ferdinan Sitohang
July 17, 2012If you want to format the usb drive, do it from computer management, go into device management, it will show you the usb drive, right click on it, then “delete logical drive” after that format it.
Thanks, didn’t know about this, it worked like a charm
July 17, 2012illegal3alien
July 17, 2012Basically what’s already been said. Open up Disk Management (Right click on My Computer and select manage. Disk Management is an option of the left)
You should see your flash drive in the lower list. It is probably broken up into multiple parts (partitions). Just right click on each one and select delete. Then, right-click on the new unallocated space and create a new partition. This will delete all the information on the flash drive, but all the space will be recovered. You can also use a partition manager like GParted and select the correct disk and delete all of the partitions and create a new one. If you want it to work with Windows and Linux, FAT32 will probably offer the best compatibility.
Thanks for such a detailed explanation, thanks a lot, I just formatted my pen drive and it is ok now
July 17, 2012ha14
July 17, 2012try to format with Easeus Partition Master
http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm
1)right clicke on your USB drive in Easeus Partition Master interface and select Create partition.
2)specify the required details (File system …) and click OK.
3)Click Apply button to apply the changes
Jimbo99
July 20, 2012I ran into all sorts of issues when I was trying to make a “real” USB linux stick that I could boot with, update, copy files to and from, install software to, etc. I searched and read the threads on the unetbootin and found it **INCOMPETENT** and then stumbled across someone that said to just install your distro to the USB stick as if it were a hard drive.
You might want to do that.
PerryKahai
July 27, 2012Ok, just answered a question that provided an answer. Reproduced below.
You have an undeletable partition, similar to what I had on my 4 GB flash drive. I had used mine to burn Ubuntu 12.04 Desktop ISO, and then used it to boot my computer from. That created several partitions, one of which was exactly .99 GB. The other 3 was taken-up by Ubuntu, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not free-up the 3 GB partition using the procedure I described above.
So, I burned the Ubuntu ISO onto a CD, then booted computer from it. I had to use it to delete all partitions from the flash drive so that I had a completely blank flash drive. Then, booted into Windows, plugged-in the flash drive, created a 4 GB partition, then formatted it.
In addition to Ubuntu, I tried Bart PE and Hiren’s CD. Neither helped me restore the 3 GB partition.
Hope this works.
Amrit
October 20, 2012If i make a win7 bootable usb and format my computer then after formating may i delete the win7 files and recover my space
Sashi Peiris
December 6, 2012You can copy all the files you need on to your computer then format the flash drive