Clean a USB flash drive with a bootable live-system in windows

Published Wednesday, November 8, 2017

I recently tried multiple linux distributions by flashing my usb drive with a bootable live-system. Without an installed linux however, I found it troubling to restore the flash drive to its original FAT32 state with standard windows tools.

After a while I found this neat solution which should work with any windows version:

1. Press Win-Key+R and type in diskpart to open windows partition tools.
2. Grant UAC access if prompted.
3. list disk to show all currently connected drives.
4. select disk # where # is your USB drives number. The size should give away which one it is.
5. Be absolutely sure this is the right drive, or you will lose data!
6. clean to remove all partitions.
7. create partition primary creates the new partition and selects it.
8. active to mark the current partition as active.
9. format fs=fat32 quick to format your drive with fat32 filesystem. Alternatively ntfs works great too for files bigger than 4GB.
10. exit to leave diskpart.
11. All done

This restores your drive without the need of any external tools.

Cheers,

Felix