Nick's love of tinkering with computers extends beyond work. In college, Nick made extensive use of Fortran while pursuing a physics degree. Before How-To Geek, he used Python and C++ as a freelance programmer. He has been using computers for 20 years - tinkering with everything from the UI to the Windows registry to device firmware. If not, share your issue with me and I’ll try to help.Nick Lewis is a staff writer for How-To Geek. The good thing is that it can be fixed with only a little effort. But then the operating system doesn’t understand it properly. This is how they function, by creating a different filesystem on the disk. Tools like Rufus and Etcher don’t really destroy your USB. When you have the entire free space created, click on the + sign to create a partition on it in NTFS or FAT32 filesystem.Ĭreate the partition with NTFS (or FAT 32), name it something appropriate and then you can enjoy the USB like it was before. If that does not work, delete the partitions individually one by one and then make the entire USB as free space. Try and format the disk from the menu above. You’ll see various partitions on the USB disk. Start disk appĪgain, make sure that you have selected the external USB disk here. It is already installed on Ubuntu and many other Linux distributions. I have noticed that live USB created by Etcher and such tools often create refuse to be formatted properly by the right click format option in the file manager.Īs an alternative, you can do what you did in Windows: delete existing partitions and create a new partition with the entire free space. What if you cannot format the USB on Linux? Formatting live Linux USB on Linux Once that is done, you’ll see that the USB has returned to normal state and you can start copy-pasting data to it. Click Next / Use entire available space / Give it a drive letter / Use FAT 32 or NTFS, Name the USB if you want / Revise all the changes Click on Next, select the entire available space, assign a letter to it, select the file system (FAT 32 or NTFS) and format it. When you see that, right click on it and click on “New Simple Volume” to create a partition. Your aim is to have only a single block of unallocated space. When asked for your confirmation, press Yes. Right click on the partition and click Delete Volume. The unallocated space cannot be deleted but that’s okay. The idea is to delete any existing partition present on the USB disk. Identify which one it is from the size of the USB disk or from the ‘Removable’ tag. This is very important to select the correct disk. This includes the plugged-in USB, of course. Start this tool and it will show all the disks present on your computer. Go to the Windows menu and look for the Disk Management tool. Windows only see the EFI partition on the USBĪll in all, what you need to do is to delete all the partition on the USB disk, create a new NTFS or FAT32 partition from the free space you got from deleting the existing partitions. This is why your Windows system only sees the EFI partition of 4 MB and shows the USB size as 4 MB. The other partition(s) is in Linux’s Ext4 filesystem which Windows do not recognize. Do you know why? Because while creating the live Linux USB, the tool creates a 4 MB of EFI partition in FAT 32 filesystem. You see only 4 MB of disk space in Windows. Formatting the live Linux USB created by Rufus or Etcher Let me show how to restore the bootable USB to a usable state in both Windows and Linux. You can still format it with a little trick and use it comfortably. Even if you manage to format it, the size of the USB is now shrunk to just 4 MB from the usual 8 GB, 16 GB or 32 GB. You try to format it and it probably won’t let you do that. You plug it in your Windows system and to your surprise, the disk capacity of the USB is just 4 MB. Now you want to format this USB and use it for regular data transfer or storage. You used it to install Linux and the purpose of the USB is accomplished. You used Etcher or Rufus tools to create a bootable, live Linux USB in Windows or perhaps in Linux.
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