Member Avatar for nadiam

Hello. I have this usb(4gb) which was given to us for free but it's been partitioned. one is 17.7 mb the other is 3.62 gb its not much or anything but its kind of irritating me because instead of only 1 removable disk i have 2 listed. How to remove/merge the 17.7mb part? I tried to reformat it but system says it is write protected. Ive tried DISKPART and editing the StorageDevicePolicies but nothing happens (as its suppose to make the usb formattable) If anyone can help me out thatd be great!

windows 8.1, 64 bit OS

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Dani AI

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A likely cause of the extra 17.7 MB volume is a vendor-mounted, read-only CD-ROM area (the old U3/launchpad-style partition) rather than a normal user partition. That explains why a normal reformat looks like it worked on the big slice but the small partition stayed. already tried registry tweaks and a simple format, so the next steps are a low-level wipe or a vendor removal tool.

Common Windows approach (destructive; back up first): open an elevated command prompt and run DiskPart to clear the readonly flag, wipe partition metadata, then recreate and format a single partition. Confirm the disk number before selecting it.

diskpart
list disk
select disk X    (replace X with the USB disk number)
attributes disk clear readonly
clean
create partition primary
format fs=FAT32 quick
assign
exit

If DiskPart reports the device is still write-protected or the clean command fails, the small partition is probably firmware-mounted and will not be removed by DiskPart. As suggested, try a vendor/low-level formatter (the HP USB Formatting tool is one example). As noted, a Linux live session with GParted will also remove partitions; if needed the MBR/partition table can be zeroed first:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M count=4

Replace sdX with the correct device; do not run on the main system disk.

Final notes: check for a physical write-protect switch, always back up data before destructive steps, and stop if the drive resists—some cheap or counterfeit sticks use firmware locks that cannot be removed and should be replaced.

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Member Avatar for rproffitt

Look around for the old but still usefull HP USB FORMATTING tool.

Member Avatar for rubberman

Assuming you don't need anything on the device, just reformat it as a raw drive. Then, add a partition, and format that with the file system you want to use. Simple with Linux. More complex (more steps) with Windows.

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