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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.

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4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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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.

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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
    Commented Jan 16, 2013 at 0:01
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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
    Commented Jan 16, 2013 at 0:05
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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
    Commented Jan 16, 2013 at 4:58
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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
    Commented May 6, 2015 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
    Commented May 28, 2015 at 18:56
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Try MiniTool Partition Wizard or choose a program from this list.

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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.

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  • If it's a large hard drive (2T and above), create as GPT partition table
    – Mike
    Commented Jun 14, 2018 at 12:44
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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

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