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I'm currently trying to format a usb drive to be used as a Win10 home boot drive.
It has previously been a Fedora workstation and Fedora Server boot drive.
I used the DISKPART utility in the windows 10 shell to wipe the drive, which had had a efi partition on it.
Now, whenever I try to format it, it fails and says "The volume was created successfully but not formatted" and "The system cannot find the file specified."

Chris Paris
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    Did you use the diskpart `CLEAN` command? – HackSlash Mar 22 '21 at 20:41
  • yes, it was the disk #2 and I selected it and used `CLEAN` on it @HackSlash – Chris Paris Mar 22 '21 at 20:43
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    Are you using `Disk Management` to create partitions before formatting? (You can't format a drive with no partitions) – HackSlash Mar 22 '21 at 20:47
  • I am using Disk Management and doing `Create New Simple Volume` and the error messages show up after I run through the wizard – Chris Paris Mar 22 '21 at 20:52
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    Does this answer your question? [Unable to format disk: 'The system cannot find the file specified'](https://superuser.com/questions/509992/unable-to-format-disk-the-system-cannot-find-the-file-specified) – HackSlash Mar 22 '21 at 21:01

1 Answers1

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Try doing this from an elevated command prompt:

diskpart
list disk
select disk X
clean
create partition primary
active
format fs=Fat32 quick

If Windows can't recover the drive then you will need to boot to Linux and format it in a way that is visible from both Linux and Windows. Like FAT32 or exFAT depending on the size of the drive.

HackSlash
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  • upon selecting the disk and running `clean`, I was given the error message `DiskPart has encountered an error: Access is denied`\ I am running this as an administrator – Chris Paris Mar 22 '21 at 21:10
  • Run Windows update. Check for chipset and usb driver updates. Reboot. Try it again. – HackSlash Mar 22 '21 at 21:10
  • also, I am running a Win10 home insider preview version 21337.rs_prerelease.210312-1502 if that makes any significant differences – Chris Paris Mar 22 '21 at 21:11