2014-05-21

USB Flash Drive Restoration

I have a few flash drives I use for my "experiments", and I'm always out for a deal to get more.  Every so often, after installing and uninstalling a variety of distros on it, I notice that it starts running out of space even if  I have deleted the previous file.  If you try to format it to get the original size, it'll sometimes say access denied on.  Annoying at the very least.  The following is my cheat sheet to rest the USBs back to it's original state.  I plucked the info from the pendrivelinux.com website.  They are an excellent website to hangout in and check. One of my favorites from their site is YUMI.  Have a 32GB flash drive and have fun with YUMI.


Restore Your USB Key to it's original state

After having tooled around with a USB Linux version using your image overwritten or multi partitioned flash pen drive, you might find it necessary to revert it back to a single fat partition (restore the flash pen drive to it's original state) that can again be read by all computers. Windows users can follow the Windows instructions below to Restore a Flash Drive using the HP USB Format Tool. For those working from Linux this task can easily be accomplished via the Linux Flash Drive Restoration tutorial that follows.

Restoring your USB key to it's original state using Windows:
BOOTICE Site: http://www.ipauly.com/bbs/
  1. Download, extract, and run Pauly's BOOTICE Tool
  2. (1) Select your USB Flash Drive from the list, (2) Click Perform Format BOOTICE - Select your USB Flash Drive, and click Perform Format
  3. (1) Under Disk Mode, Choose USB-FDD Mode (2) Click Next Step BOOTICE - Select USB-FDD Mode, then Click Next
  4. (1) Select a File System type (2) Click Ok BOOTICE - Select a File System Type, and Click Ok
  5. (1) Make sure you have backed up any important info, then Click OK, (2) Verify the drive letter and Click Yes to Proceed to let BOOTICE partition and format the USB Flash Drive BOOTICE - Make sure you have backed up any important data, then proceed
Restoring your USB key to it's original state using Linux:
A. First we need to delete the old partitions that remain on the USB key.
  1. Open a terminal and type sudo su
  2. Type fdisk -l and note your USB drive letter.
  3. Type fdisk /dev/sdx (replacing x with your drive letter)
  4. Type d to proceed to delete a partition
  5. Type 1 to select the 1st partition and press enter
  6. Type d to proceed to delete another partition (fdisk should automatically select the second partition)
B. Next we need to create the new partition.
  1. Type n to make a new partition
  2. Type p to make this partition primary and press enter
  3. Type 1 to make this the first partition and then press enter
  4. Press enter to accept the default first cylinder
  5. Press enter again to accept the default last cylinder
  6. Type w to write the new partition information to the USB key
  7. Type umount /dev/sdx1 (replacing x with your drive letter)
C. The last step is to create the fat filesystem.
  1. Type mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdx1 (replacing x with your USB key drive letter)
That's it, you should now have a restored USB key with a single fat 32 partition that can be read from any computer.

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