Windows 10: How do I reformat the 64GB USB stick used by media creation tool ?

Thank you everyone for your suggestions. Windows 10 itself could not fix this. Disk manager options (certainly any I wanted) were greyed out.

So I did download and install MiniTool Partition Wizard free:

That allowed me to follow on from the place I had got to of an unallocated 64GB, create a partition, set it active and set it primary. WHen I was about to scream because nothing was happening I realised there is a big APPLY button to press. Pressing that enacted all the changes and the 64GB USB stick is now back to visible and usable in windows.





Clearly MiniTool Partition Wizard free: is a very useful tool.
Thankyou forumites. THis is so much more useful a forum than the windows community. I wish I had found it sooner.

 

I feel my problems with this thread were brought about by using the media creation tool, which did stuff to the usb that windows 10 could not undo. In terms of Windows 10, I am still on Build 10240, and had been going to use mct to attempt again to upgrade to 10586.
Instead, I shall now search the tenforums site for the best way to do so.

 

Download the matching eddition ISO file, I recommend from Tech Bench, right click on the ISO file, select Mount, run setup.exe from the virtual drive letter that appears.

Windows 10 ISO Download - Windows 10 Forums

Once you are done with the upgrade, you can remove the virtual drive letter by right clicking on it and selecting Eject. That will not delete the ISO, you can either keep it for future use or delete the file itself.

 

Now I am stuck as to what to do. I have also found from creating an Ubuntu bootable USB that I have the same issue on a micro sd card which is in it's original USB holder. You can see disk 3 is the subect of this post, disk 4 is the micro SD card in a USB caddy.



What can I do now?[/quote] you entered

create primary partition

should be

create partition primary

 

Oops. That is why I generally avoid the command line. You can make significant problems if you do it wrong. Thanks for pointing it out - I kept reading and obviously read what I expected not what was there! Doh!

 

Now try to assign a drive letter to the second partition you went ahead and created on the flash drive and see where you get?! Then take a look at it from a regular File Explorer window. You may find that the only place you can see it is in the DM there! With recovery sticks here already there enough times where I would end needing to repartition a flash drive.

This is what I have conveyed to a number of people over the years that not everyone will want to use or even feel comfortable using a command line rather then the gui method. Keeping a few live Linux distros here as well as the latest GParted cd for work while not booted in Windows can be handy at times while the Mint. But whichever partitioning option is used you will want to see this when going to add a second partition on any flash drive other then a mountable Linux volume or swat part when seeing a live recovery stick made up.





With GParted or the Gnome Partition Editor as well as the DiskPart tool you wouldn't see that warning appear! The MiniTool program does however and only confirms what I have been saying.

 

Thanks, but N/A. Disk 3 is the one I had been having problems with that I hda solved. Disk 4 is the additional flash drive that I'd used as a bootable Ubuntu but now wanted back for other use.

Agreed. I have never tried to create partitions on a flash drive. I've doneit with hard disks in Windows since XP, for a dual boot system, but I'm not playing around with such things now.

 

Flash drives are a different animal to work with entirely. SSDs are much closer to that form of static memory over mechanical drive while retaining the standard partitioning options. Flash drives, SD cards, and other removable media simply don't have that.

As for partitioning and repartitioning drives the DM itself has always been a bit limited with the idea there mainly as an option available for secondary drives to simply see either a new volume go onto a raw drive or wipe a drive clean. Supposedly since 7 the resize option was to be included but never fully realized. Either the Drive tools on the Windows media or a 3rd party program like MiniTools is often what you end up with.

Here for booted live ops I will usually go with GParted live cd or booted live from a distro when repartitioning for any OS changes. The non MS alternative there works on most every OS since you can see Fat 32 and NTFS volumes as well as for the Linux VFat Ext2-5 type depending on the release and how old it is.