Dr Laurie Miles wrote:
> I've just come across a drug rep donated USB memory stick in
> a fetching rubberised green colour. Given the hammering my
> kids give these things at school, I thought I'd donate it to
> one of them. However, it has a small partition which WinXP
> sees as a CD-ROM drive, and I can find no way in WinXP to
> wipe this partition and create one large partition on the
> drive - it basically needs a low level partition in the way
> you used to be able to do this with ATA & SCSI drives. I
> don't have a Linux machine - anyone know of a way to do a
> destructive format of one of these devices from within Windows?
>
> Laurie Miles
> PS It also has an autorun.inf file written incorrectly, and
> keeps crashing the presentation it is supposed to run, then
> repeatedly restarts. It completely froze the first PC I put
> it in - not a good advert...
A bit late in the day, I know, but have you had a look at the command-line
program "diskpart"?
Here's an extract from the help information available in XP:
DiskPartDiskPart.exe is a text-mode command interpreter that enables you to
manage objects (disks, partitions, or volumes) by using scripts or direct
input from a command prompt. Before you can use DiskPart.exe commands on a
disk, partition, or volume, you must first list and then select the object
to give it focus. When an object has focus, any DiskPart.exe commands that
you type act on that object.
<snip>
clean
Removes any and all partition or volume formatting from the disk with focus.
On master boot record (MBR) disks, only the MBR partitioning information and
hidden sector information are overwritten. On GUID Partition Table (GPT)
disks, the GPT partitioning information, including the Protective MBR, is
overwritten. There is no hidden sector information.
Syntax
clean [all]
Parameter
all
Specifies that each and every sector on the disk is zeroed, which completely
deletes all data contained on the disk.
<snip>
Michael
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