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I own a Kingston thumb-stick. I have installed a Google Chrome OS image to it, so I could try it out. When it did so, it created 3 partitions (I backed everything up and the software that installed Chrome OS deleted my thumb-stick completely and created three partitions).

Now I want to get it back to one partition, but when I go to Disk Management, it will not let me "extend" the partition. I have tried different partitioning tools but they didn't recognize my thumb-stick anyway. I have also tried diskpart to no avail. Is there any software that will completely format my thumb-stick so I would only have one partition?

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4 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

You can use Active@KillDisk; the free version includes a Windows application that will do the job.

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Thank YOU so much!!! I can't believe I didn't know that. Well I'm learning something new everyday :D – ra4king Jan 12 '10 at 23:43
umm, i suppose you have found that out by now :) and you're more than welcome. – Molly7244 Jan 12 '10 at 23:56
lol, yeah I figured it out :P – ra4king Jan 13 '10 at 0:09
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up vote 2 down vote

Active KillDisk will not see the linux formatted partitions and will not erase the entire disk when using it within windows. It will work on Linux though. Use dariks boot and nuke instead http://dban.org.

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I beg to differ: Killdisk will KILL all partitions regardless the filesystem, only the 'Wipe Free Space' feature doesn't work on linux filesystems when using it in Windows. – Molly7244 Jan 12 '10 at 1:23
No It won't see the volume's full size if it has linux partitions. – at. Jan 12 '10 at 1:28
yes, it does, i just 'killed' a USB stick formatted with Ext3 with KillDisk in Windows, no problem. – Molly7244 Jan 12 '10 at 1:55
+ 1 anyway, i won't argue anymore about it because DBAN is overall the better software. the reason i recommended Killdisk: the Windows version kills USB drives just fine whereas DBAN sometimes has trouble detecting USB devices ... and in this case even the best software in the world is quite useless for the task at hand. :) – Molly7244 Jan 12 '10 at 2:09
What does "killing the disk" mean? – ra4king Jan 12 '10 at 23:36
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up vote 0 down vote

You can also do this with the Computer management tool in Windows. right-click 'My Computer' then choose 'manage'. In there you find 'disk management', it lists all your disks and you will see that your USB key has more than one partition, delete all partitions and format the key from there.

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Use this: HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool

HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool was developed to be a Windows-based format utility for the HP Drive Key or DiskOnKey USB 2.0 device.Users have the possibility to easily create bootable disks, or change the file system from FAT to NTFS for their Flash drives.

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Could you please elaborate a bit on how one would use it? – slhck Aug 21 '11 at 9:04
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