Competition - post a photo you've taken of nature >>

Formatting a "Two-Drive?" locked USB?

My dad has some old USB sticks from work which contain PDFs of product catalogues and manuals. They are being chucked out as they are not needed or even been used, and rather than chuck them, he brought them home (with permission) as I want to organise my old files rather than store them on my PC, and its better than wasting them.

They have 2 "drives" on it, one tiny space for storage, and one for the catalogues and manuals. The latter is the part what is locked and cant be saved into and you cannot delete them but can access the files.

I have tried formatting it but it says as the title says, its locked. Any idea of a get around? I would really like to format it so its just 1 drive, or even if I can use the locked part to store as 2 drives it wouldnt matter, it would be better than just using the small storage space, as the files take a huge chunk of its full capacity.

Thanks!

Reply 1

Teruko

You can delete the partitions then make a new one
What OS are you using?

(edited 1 year ago)

Reply 2

lildannys95

Original post by Teruko

You can delete the partitions then make a new one
What OS are you using?

Hey, Windows 10 :smile:

Reply 3

Teruko

Original post by lildannys95

Hey, Windows 10 :smile:

In that case, press the windows key then type "disk management" and press enter. This should open the disk management utility.
After that, click on the partitions that you want to delete, and press the delete key. Be careful not to delete the wrong partitions (C: drive is the system drive so you don't want to touch that one).
You should be able to identify the correct partitions by their size and number - there will be two of them, one small, one big, and should be in a row labelled USB flash drive.
So delete those, then right click the "unallocated space" and select create a new partition.

Hope that works!