Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Found this neat set of instructions on how to repartition & reformat a USB thumb drive without any additional utilities or tools from the command prompt using DiskPart that I thought I’d share.  (And I’m basically posting this to make sure I can find it again in the future.)

From a command prompt in Windows:

1. From Command prompt type diskpart

2.Within Diskpart, use the List Disk command to check which disk the USB device is. The USB device should be obvious; in my case, it’s the 14GB disk.

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt

  ——–  ————-  ——-  ——-  —  —

  Disk 0    Online          232 GB  1024 KB

  Disk 1    Online          149 GB      0 B

  Disk 2    Online          149 GB  7168 KB

* Disk 3    Online           14 GB      0 B

3 Once the disk is known, select the disk and run the rest of the displayed commands (change "disk 3" to the number of your disk):

DISKPART> select disk 3

Disk 3 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> clean

DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.

DISKPART> create partition primary

DiskPart succeeded in creating the specified partition.

DISKPART> select partition 1

Partition 1 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> active

DiskPart marked the current partition as active.

DISKPART> format fs=ntfs quick

100 percent completed

DiskPart successfully formatted the volume.

DISKPART> assign

DiskPart successfully assigned the drive letter or mount point.

DISKPART> exit

(taken from http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/128581-how-to-delete-partition-on-usb-thumb-drive)