Removing a partition on a flash drive?

gizmo1990 · 11 Jan 2020 at 15:35

I have an old 64gb usb3 flash drive which I can't seem to delete the partitions from and make one clean whole partition. Disk manager and diskpart have both failed to delete it.

I keep getting told this,

the operation is not supported on a non-empty removable disk

I'm sure I remember some kind of 'official' program which would do this with troublesome partitions? Does anyone know what it is and where I can find it?

Any advice greatly appreciated.

b00merang69 · 11 Jan 2020 at 15:39

I seem to remember the SanDisk Cruzer came out the box with some default hidden partition (U3) and since I was using these for ReadyBoost (back in the day) I wanted rid of it.

I think I used https://www.diskpart.com/articles/erase-files-sandisk-usb-3889.html

or the U3 Removal Tool

https://superuser.com/questions/621067/reusing-a-usb-flash-drive-with-a-hidden-partition

https://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2550/kw/u3 removal#method2

Mcnumpty2323 · 11 Jan 2020 at 20:20

I messed up one of my USB flash drives messing around with bit flipping
From memory as well as what was already mentioned think there's HP USB tool that helped lots of people
But stored somewhere on my pc is some manufacturers software that was the only thing out of an awful lot of solutions I tried that finally fixed it

Will have a look once on pc see if can find it for you if not sorted it before then

edit

software is called transcend jetflash online recovery tool
its downloadable so the online bit in names little confusing

edit

doesnt matter what make your drives are mine werent transcend ones

gizmo1990 · 12 Jan 2020 at 00:01

Thanks for the replies guys. I tried the transcend tool which didn't work unfortuantely. However a tip on the superuser forum did. It looks like running diskpart as admin is important. So too is listing the disk and the clean command. That fixed it and enabled me to format the entire drive via disk manager.

Mcnumpty2323 · 12 Jan 2020 at 00:10

gizmo1990 said:
Thanks for the replies guys. I tried the transcend tool which didn't work unfortuantely. However a tip on the superuser forum did. It looks like running diskpart as admin is important. So too is listing the disk and the clean command. That fixed it and enabled me to format the entire drive via disk manager.

main thing is you got sorted

and yeah always best to run cmd as an administrator
free softwares like win aero for example can add a right click run cmd as administrator option
that way i dont forget to run it as admin lol