Problems with reformatting pen drives

Northerner · 26 Aug 2012

I purchased a new Verbatam 32gb mini pen drive with the intention of using it as a boot option for Ubuntu 12.04. Reformatted to NTFC and loaded Ubuntu on to it (27.01gb primary & 2.81 gb swap area), anyway proved too slow so I tried to delete each section and reformat back to fat 32. Problem is the delete option will not highlight to allow me to proceed, therefore I am stuck with an new unusable 32gb pen drive.

Problems with reformatting pen drives-disc-drives.jpg

Any help please in rectifying the problem.

Regards.
Northerner

Layback Bear · 26 Aug 2012

Start/Computer/right click on the drive, in my case travel guide G and select format. Remove the pen drive when done.
Make sure you select the correct drive.

Northerner · 26 Aug 2012

Will not let me do this ?
Comes up "Unknown capacity", when I press form a message appears saying window unable to complete format.
Regards
Northerner

karlsnooks · 26 Aug 2012

Northener,

PREPARE UFD (USB FLASH DRIVE)

Run CMD.EXE as administrator
Type following commands and hit ENTER key after each command.
· DISKPART starts the DiskPart program
· LIST DISK shows numeral assigned to disks
note the numeral assigned to your usb stick
The numeral 2 will be used in this example
· SELECT DISK 2
· DETAIL DISK the info shown will confirm the correctness of your selection
· CLEAN ALL the entire usb stick will be overwritten with zeros
· CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY create a primary partition on the USB stick
· FORMAT FS=NTFS format the partition
· ACTIVE the partition can contain operating system startup files
· ASSIGN the next available letter is assigned to the USB stick
· EXIT exit from the DISKPART program
· EXIT exit from the command shell

Northerner · 26 Aug 2012

Thanks, worked a treat.
Regards
Northerner (north of England).

karlsnooks · 26 Aug 2012

Glad to be of assistance

Karl

Layback Bear · 26 Aug 2012

Just a though: If having to use the cmd prompt to defrag would doing a sfc /scannow allow my method post #2 to work. It's always worked for me. I just did one to verify. Just curious.

slurp812 · 26 Aug 2012

Northerner said:

Will not let me do this ?
Comes up "Unknown capacity", when I press form a message appears saying window unable to complete format.
Regards
Northerner

If you are familiar with Linux, this is easy with a live CD distro, you can boot it up, and run Linux fdisk, and remove the partitions...

Layback Bear · 26 Aug 2012

Thanks for the replies. I'm not sure I understand but I will work on it.

gregrocker · 26 Aug 2012

When formatted the stick (Disk2 below) had a Primary first partition and Logical second one.

So when it had the partitions deleted in Disk mgmt the first partition became (Primary) Unallocated Space, while the second partition became (Logical) Free Space.

You only need to delete the Logical Free space by right clicking on it again to Delete Volume. Then you can format the stick as desired.

Partition Wizard views both types of deleted space the same for all purposes,