16gb flash drive randomly now has 3gb FAT32 and 12gb unallocated!

I don’t care about what’s on this flash stick; I just want to wipe it and reformat it.

I tried Disk Management but it won’t let me delete the partition. I can create another partition on the unallocated space but I don’t want to do it that way.

With hard drives I have a bootable floppy or CD that I run and just type “wipe 0” to wipe the drive. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to work with USB devices.

How can I wipe this thing out to repartition and format?

 

Well reformatting it will wipe it. You tried the Windows format utility?
If that doesn't work, the HP Format Tool is supposed to be really good. http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=197

 

Big difference between a wipe and a format. Formatting won't erase all the partitions.

 

The HP Tool is supposed to completely erase everything on there.

 

Don't trust any important data to that stick. Once flash drives start flaking out like that it usually means that they're on their way out.

 

Have you tried extending the existing partition into the remaining unallocated space?

Also, out of curiosity, have you been able to use the rest of that drive before? It's not uncommon for fake flash drives to have about 3 GB of usable space, with the rest being completely unusable.

 

Yah it's been fine forever. Randomly today it said it was full when I was copying files... and I saw it was only like 3.3GB!

 

Hm. If you can't extend the partition to the unallocated space, then I would probably agree with Pitabred in that your flash drive is probably starting to flake out. Remember that all solid state storage to date, especially the cheaper cells used in flash/jump drives have a limited number of write cycles, and heavy use will wear them out (this is why those adaptors that turn SDHC cards into a "cheap SSD" drive really aren't that useful; the SDHC cards will wear out very quickly).

 

I thought this might be a FAT16 vs FAT32 problem but a Google search (after posting) says FAT16's max size is 2GB... so nvm.

 

I have the Corsair Flash Voyager so at least it wasn't a no name.

I've only had it maybe 4 months.

So there's no low level format I can do on it to wipe the partitions?

Just looked it up and it has a 10 year warranty. Guess I'll just send it back!

 

I assume urv fiddled with reformatting options from right clicking the flash drive from my computer



Maybe try restore device default button, or reformatting with and without quick format box ticked

 

Use a GParted live cd to delete and recreate the partition.