USB Pen drive partition

[forthbridge]

HI Guys..... Last night, I stupidly fell for a £5 2 gig Maxell pen drive in Asda (Stupid as MX2 sell the Kingston 4gig at £7 delivered and give great service)

anyway..... it had a 'Toshiba privatezone' partition system on it. I did not set this up, and decided to format the drive. Unfortunately, I formatted the 'main' public partition which was at a default 10 megabytes. This deleted the path to the secind parition, so now I am left with a 10 meg drive, and no way I can find to extend the partition, format etc.


Anyone have any ideas how to reclaim the space under Vista? At least it was only a fiver, but my own haste caused this as much as the odd setup on the drive

[TSR2]

Hi Jim,

You'll need to run something like diskpart to delete the partitions... which OS are you running and I'll give you the cmd.

[EDIT]

I'm assuming you've tried to delete the Partitions using the disk manager?

[forthbridge]

Hi Ben,
I've tried using Diskpart, although all I get is 'Windows cannot delete volumes on removable media' and 'The selected volume cannot be extended because the file system on the volume does not support extending'

:think:

[TSR2]

Hi mate, I assume its Vista? You can't delete the volume, but you should be able to delete the partitions and then reformat the volume as a single partition. Are you right clicking on the command icon and selecting "Run As Administrator"?

[EDIT] just tried this on one of the guys in works USB drive and I get the "Cannot delete volumes on removable media" message too. But I did this on the memory stick I got from Jessops at Christmas as it had a stupid boot partition on it that started up a virtual CD rom drive thing. I wonder have they changed the way diskpart opperates on removable media.... going to check Technet.

[forthbridge]

Hi Ben

Yup, Vista. I'm running admin, but it seems to all intents, Diskpart is only seeing what the system does (a 10 meg pen) -
List partition shows Primary (1) - but, I cannot select with 'select partition=1' - it just says 'no partition selected'.

I think It's just seeing it as the whole disk?

[TSR2]

Hi Jim,

You need to go into Diskpart, then SELECT DISK '*' where '*' is the number of the disk volume (This can be got by right clicking my computer and selecting manage, then selecting disk management. You'll see your first hard disk is Disk 0, the next one is Disk 1 etc.)
Having selected the disk, then do a select partition. You can select partition until you've selected the disk if that makes sense.

[forthbridge]

HI Ben

I can select the disk OK (number 5) and see the primary partition (IE list partition when disk is selected and showing so) - but It just keeps saying no partition selected if I try to select it (IE select partion=1)

In diskpart, I type
List disk
Select disk 5
List partition
then can't 'select' with the command :think:

EDIT

beginning to think unless I can find some software to do it, it's not possible..... Windows cannot see past the 10 Meg partition as the primary, so as far as its concerened, it's a 10 meg drive (if that makes sense)

[TSR2]

Just had a look on the toshiba site mate....
http://uk.computers.toshiba-europe.com/ ... service=UK

From the drop down lists select...
Options & Acessories / Expansions / USB Memory / USB Flash Drive / Windows Vista.... then click search. Download the "Secure Password Lock" utility and you can set the size on that... including removing all the stupid zone stuff. The reason you can see the other partitions is that they are encrypted ;-)

[forthbridge]

Cheers Ben.. will give that a go!

[forthbridge]

Well, downloaded, but, no luck :-(

It seems whatever lurked on the now hidden partition needs to be seen by the lock utility (it basically tells me to insert the stick when I have done so!)

Never mind, cheers for the help Ben!