remove one drive on a USB stick with two drives

Hi WindowsBBS crew,

A USB stick I have appears to have two seperate drives: a 40MB drive (read-only, cannot format) and a ~970MB drive (read/write, can format).

I would like to remove the 40MB drive. Failing this I would like to merge it with the 970MB drive or to remove it.

I am using XP Pro SP2.

In disk manager the two drives appear seperately:
Disk 3 Removable 40MB Online
(G 40MB FAT Healthy (Active)

Disk 4 Removable 969MB Online
(H 969MB FAT32 Healthy (Active)

When attempting to format G: I get the error "The operation did not complete because the media is write-protected ".

A final note: this is a 'promotional' flash drive - the first drive has the company's promotional movie (which I'm sick of) and on other computers sometimes only this first drive is detected, rendering the flash drive basically useless.

Your help would be greatly appreciated and thanks for your time and efforts in advance.

Simon

 

Thanks for the prompt reply Steve.
Could you please expand on the above point? The option to "Delete partition..." is greyed out on both drives.

Cheers
Simon

 

No guarantee, but this free software may give you full control to do what you want.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gparted/files/gparted/gparted-0.7.0/

 

Apologies for the delayed reply; I've only just had a chance to re-visit this issue.

As far as I can tell it is not (no autorun software, hidden files or executables etc).

Thanks for the link Mark. You stretched my "Intermediate" computer skills but I figured out how to boot this CD

So: GParted recognises the two USB drives separately (that is, not as individual partitions on the same drive but as two separate drives). Unfortunately the following warning appears on the information tab for the drive I want to delete:


"Can't open /dev/sdb1: No such file or directory
Cannot initialize 'H:'

mlabel: Cannot initialize drive
Unable to open /dev/sdb read-write (Read-only file system). /dev/sdb has been opened read-only.
dosfsck 3.0.9 (31 Jan 2010)
dosfsck 3.0.9, 31 Jan 2010, FAT32 LFN

open: No such file or directory

Unable to read the contents of this file system!
Because of this some operations may be unavailable.
The following list of software packages is required for fat16 file system support: dosfstools, mtools. "


When I try to delete or format this drive I get similar errors of "read-only file system ".

From the error message I would assume I need to incorporate dosfstools and mtools into the operating environment of GParted. Does anyone know where to get these software packages and how to incorporate that into the operating environment?

 

I'll look into this later but for now just a thought that you may need to run any commands as administrator. There is a method for taking ownership of a drive, I don't have instructions to hand but if you search for that you may find some usefull information. The lack of access to the drive will be due to "Permisssions ", taking ownership should get you in there.

 

I had this guide saved all along, give it a try and then see if you get control back.

I've just noticed in your opening post that you are using SP2, this service pack is no longer supported which could leave your computer vulnerable to attack, you should upgrade to SP3 as soon as you can.

 

There seems to be a large number of different ways to deal with a flash drive, this item of software looks encouraging. May be worth a try.

http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=197