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I have a USB drive that I accidentally partitioned when trying to put Ubuntu on it. It's a 16 GB Kingston flash drive but it is now split to two partitions, 7.30 GB each.

How do I combine the two partitions into one? I have tried Disk Management in Windows but no luck.

Indrek
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Megaeverything
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    Can't test that on windows, but if you have Linux unstalled or can boot a live CD or something, you can use `cfdisk`, delete all partitions then create a new unique one. – lmcanavals Jan 15 '13 at 22:22

4 Answers4

320

You can do this by using diskpart on Windows:

  1. Open an elevated command prompt.
  2. Run diskpart
  3. list disk
  4. Note the disk number that corresponds to your USB drive (it should be obvious going by size)
  5. select disk X where X is the number from step 4
  6. list partition - There should be two, numbered 0 and 1, each about 7 GB
  7. select partition 0
  8. delete partition
  9. select partition 1
  10. delete partition
  11. create partition primary
  12. exit
  13. Exit Command Prompt (type exit or just close the window)
  14. In Windows, go to Computer(or This PC for Windows 10) and try to open the disk. It will ask you to format it.
  15. Format it with the default settings and give it a name if you want.

It should now a single, unified partitioned drive.

Zarif Muhtasim
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K.A.Monica
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    everything works untill step 6. there is still only 1 partition listed as 7569mb. the problem might be that the second partition is not allocated to anything? – Megaeverything Jan 16 '13 at 00:01
  • I had assumed both were partitioned, but you are probably right. The idea is to completely remove all partitions and then create a new one, which will be default take up the entire flash drive. – K.A.Monica Jan 16 '13 at 00:03
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    and i do that how? – Megaeverything Jan 16 '13 at 00:04
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    The steps in my answer will do it for you. If there is only partition 0 and no partition 1, skip steps 8 and 9, but do the rest. – K.A.Monica Jan 16 '13 at 00:05
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    Instead of selecting every partition one by one and then deleting, you should be able to simply use `clean` after selecting a disk. – Karan Jan 16 '13 at 04:58
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    May uese `clean` command after step 7 to erases everything on the selected disk. – AzizSM Oct 02 '14 at 05:35
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    I had to perform four more steps to get my single partition to be recognized by Windows (after step 11) as a letter drive (The biggest is probably the "assign" step. Please note I wasn't trying to save anything on the USB drive so a full format wasn't a concern for me): 11a. select partition 1 11b. active 11c. format fs=ntfs quick 11d. assign – Chad Cook May 06 '15 at 13:03
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    thank you so so much, I had to use `delete partition override` for it to work. But this answer was perfect and to the point. – Zapnologica May 28 '15 at 18:56
  • After recreating the primary partition, my machine running Windows 10 was unwilling to recognize the partition enough to present it in the Computer view or allow it to be formatted using Disk Management or diskpart itself. Converting the disk to GPT using `convert gpt` after deleting the partition in step 8 allowed the newly created partition to be formatted. Note that you can't do certain things with GPT. I ended up moving it back to MBR (`convert mbr`) later, and it worked fine. – Charles Feb 17 '16 at 20:48
  • I had an issue where it showed 2 partition 0's (one logical, one extended) and I could not simply remove them as per KA. I took Azi's suggestion and it worked, so I thought I would reiterate the steps with that method. Open an elevated command prompt. 1. Run diskpart 2. list disk 3. Note the disk number that corresponds to your USB drive (it should be obvious going by size) 4. select disk X where X is the number from step 4 5. clean 6. create partition primary 7. exit – Chris Seline Feb 23 '16 at 13:58
  • Not sure if the syntax has changed in time, but on Windows 10, I had to type `select partition=0` instead of `select partition 0`. – wovano Jul 31 '22 at 14:08
10

Try MiniTool Partition Wizard or choose a program from this list.

5

Just open the drive with GParted (included on Ubuntu; make sure to boot it from another device than the USB drive) and click "Create new Partition Table". Select MS-DOS and create one big FAT32 partition to fill the drive.

WindowsEscapist
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2

I can recommend rufus. When you have a USB stick with multiple partitions attached, it will automatically select the USB-Stick, detect that it has multiple partitions and you can format the stick safely (select defaults - non-bootable, MBR).

Install with Chocolatey: choco install rufus

Alex
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