repartition flash drive?

[Farmer Mike]

I have a couple of flash/USB/thumb drives I got cheap. They both have two partitions, one for data and the other for Windows apps like anti-virus etc.

Since I no longer use Windows, I would like to remove the smaller partition and make the drives one large data partition. How do I do this? With QTParted or GParted?

Mike

[oz]

I've found that some flash drives have special partitions on them that can be very difficult to remove. Otherwise, either of the apps you mention above should be able to handle the partitioning easily.

[Themer]

True - if all is well you should just be able to format the whole thing as FAT or ext2 if you want (no windows can read it though...)

In my opinion there should be laws against making formats that can't be easily read and managed by anything, aka anything not standardized, for instance, something not on the list of GParted

[Farmer Mike]

So I can just delete the smaller partition and format it as, say VFAT?

[Themer]

If it's not some propriety garbage, then yes. And it's unlikely that it is...

[oz]

Yes, you should be able to if it doesn't have one of those weird partitions that I mentioned above.

[Farmer Mike]

I downloaded and installed QTParted and GParted on my system today, so tomorrow I'll try that. Thanks, guys.

Mike

[oz]

If these drives should have the proprietary partitions on them, you can usually go to the manufacturer's website and download a tool that will remove them. It might be a Windows only tool, though.

Let us know how it goes.

[rockaway]

You can browse to BootDisk.com and download software that will help - load it onto a floppy disk, restart your computer, go into the BIOS, set your boot-priority to your floppy drive, insert the disk, and restart again.

If you are using windows XP then,follow the steps mentioned.
1) Open the Control Panel.
2) Open Administrative Tools.
3) Open Computer Management.
4) In the left pane, under Storage, open Disk Management.
5) The right pane should show a list of your drives, by letter, above a diagram of what partitions they have if any.
6) Right-click within any of the fields below the colored bars, and select Delete Partition.

For better reading click here.

[F0rmatR]

This is all I would do.
lets say your flash drive is /dev/sda
use fdisk /dev/sda
to see what is on the drive right now type "p" enter
to delete partitions type "d" enter, delete all the partitions that are there
now make a new partition, (one partition for the whole drive), type "n" enter
then "p" enter 1 is default and just keep hitting enter untill you have one
partition that uses the whole drive space.
by default it will be a ext2 partition. if this is what you want then just type "w" and you are done with fdisk. if you want to change it to a different type of filesystem, (fat32), type "t" then "b".
when done you need to format this bugger.
for fat32 (vfat), mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/sda1
for ext2 (linux), mke2fs /dev/sda1
you don't need anything more then what you have.
later. hope this helps...
Keep it Free.