Windows formatting utility

[BriGy86]

I have an 8 gig flash drive that has about 6 gigs of unallocated space an 1.5 of a windows partition.

It doesn't look like I can wipe it all clean and make one large windows partition. Am I doing something wrong or does their partition application just suck?

 

[MStele]

What do you mean? Drives are rated with a GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes but operating systems measure it as 1,073,741,824. On average you only ever get about 93% of the rated capacity. There is nothing wrong with the formatting utility

If your talking about multiple partitions, you should be able to create one big one, however don't necessarily expect the partition enlargment tools to work. There are alot of variables at play, based on fragmentation and contigious spcae. The easily way is to just boot from your windows disc (or other disk manager) and delete all partitions are set it up as you like.

 

[RebateMonger]

Microsoft's "DiskPart.exe" program, especially the Vista and Win7 versions, add some features and capabilities that the Windows graphical formatting commands don't offer. For instance, you can delete partitions that can't be touched from Windows itself.

 

[BriGy86]

I currently have 1 windows partition on the drive and a bunch of on allocated space. If I right click the partitioned portion I get no option to format, or delete it. It seems impossible to clear the entire drive and get a single 7.65 GB drive.
(I do realize what the drive is rated and what windows sees are 2 different things as well)

 

[MStele]

How much space are we talking? Its impossible to partition 100% of any drive, usually there isa little left at the end? Also, check to see if you need to partition it. Usually, if you have a harddrive partitioned there are two parts. Your primary, active partition and an extended partition. For the latter, its actually two parts. First, you create the partition space, and then you create the individual partitions within it.

If that doesn't work I'm not sure what it could be.

 

[Nothinman]

I currently have 1 windows partition on the drive and a bunch of on allocated space. If I right click the partitioned portion I get no option to format, or delete it. It seems impossible to clear the entire drive and get a single 7.65 GB drive.
(I do realize what the drive is rated and what windows sees are 2 different things as well)

I don't have an answer for you, but it might be because it's a flash drive. MS put some weird restrictions in Windows with regards to partitioning of flash drives. As RebateMonger says, it might be worth trying the cli diskpart program and see if it works.

Its impossible to partition 100% of any drive, usually there isa little left at the end?

That's just a MS thing, they leave ~8M at the end in case you ever decide to convert to a dynamic disk.

Usually, if you have a harddrive partitioned there are two parts. Your primary, active partition and an extended partition.

Not necessarily, you can have up to 4 primary partitions with a legacy BIOS partition table.

 

[BriGy86]

the disk management utility doesn't seem to allow you to create multiple partitions either on a flash drive.

 

[Nothinman]

the disk management utility doesn't seem to allow you to create multiple partitions either on a flash drive.

That's the weird restriction I was talking about, but I wasn't sure why it wouldn't let you delete the one that's on there.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Sometimes, if the disk info is funky, Disk Management will NOT let you delete a partition that is taking up only a portion of the space, with the remainder unallocated. I know someone that had this problem with a magnetic disk before.

The solution was to use the mfg's diagnostic tools to wipe the drive.

For USB flash drives, there's a tool that you can use to wipe/test the drives. I'll try to find a link to it. link


Then use this tool to format it. You need DOS system files to make it bootable.

 

[DrGreen2007]

'clean' from diskpart doesnt work to clear the entire drive?

 

[MStele]

In my opinion, if your looking for a powerful way to do partitions just download a linux live dvd and use fdisk. You can create NTFS partitions and whatnot. Just realize that this method has no tolerance for people who don't know what they are doing.

 

[BriGy86]

Originally posted by: MStele
In my opinion, if your looking for a powerful way to do partitions just download a linux live dvd and use fdisk. You can create NTFS partitions and whatnot. Just realize that this method has no tolerance for people who don't know what they are doing.

This is what I'm talking about. It's a bit frustrating that something free like Linux can do LOADS more than the format utility in windows.

 

[Nothinman]

Originally posted by: BriGy86

Originally posted by: MStele
In my opinion, if your looking for a powerful way to do partitions just download a linux live dvd and use fdisk. You can create NTFS partitions and whatnot. Just realize that this method has no tolerance for people who don't know what they are doing.

This is what I'm talking about. It's a bit frustrating that something free like Linux can do LOADS more than the format utility in windows.

From a technical perspective OSS software is almost always more capable because it's built by people that use it and have specific needs to meet. Most of the restrictions of close source software come from stupid assumptions and licensing.