How to quickly and easily remove a CDROM partition from an Alcor flash drive. How to delete partitions on a USB flash drive that the computer does not see Removing the boot record from a flash drive
On our website there are many instructions on how to make a bootable flash drive from a regular flash drive (for example, for installing Windows). But what if you need to return the flash drive to its previous state? We will try to answer this question today.
The first thing to note is that banal formatting will not be enough. The fact is that when a flash drive is converted into a boot drive, a special service file is written to a memory sector that is inaccessible to the user and cannot be erased using conventional methods. This file forces the system to recognize not the actual volume of the flash drive, but the occupied image of the system: for example, only 4 GB ( Windows image 7) from, say, 16 GB (actual capacity). As a result, only these 4 gigabytes can be formatted, which, of course, is not suitable.
There are several solutions to this problem. The first is to use specialized software designed to work with drive layout. Second, use the built-in using Windows. Each option is good in its own way, so let's look at them.
Note! Each of the methods described below involves formatting the flash drive, which will delete all data on it!
Method 1: HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool
Despite its cumbersomeness, this method is good with an almost one hundred percent guarantee of a positive result in most cases.
The methods described above are the most convenient for the end user. If you know alternatives, please share them in the comments.
The Grub bootloader is the default bootloader used by most Linux distributions. Grub stands for GRand Unified Bootloader, it supports booting not only Linux, but also Windows and DOS.
If you installed Linux, and then for some reason decided to remove it and return to Windows or created bootable USB flash drive Linux, but now you no longer need it, you need to remove the Grub bootloader. In this instruction, we will look at how to remove the Grub bootloader from the MBR or from the UEFI, and we will also talk about how to remove Grub from a flash drive.
How to remove Grub bootloader and restore Windows
If you have two operating systems installed on your computer, Windows and Linux, and you want to erase Linux and its bootloader by restoring the Windows bootloader, and you are using an MBR table, then this is very easy to do.
The network often recommends a method: take installation disk Windows, boot from it into recovery mode and run the commands:
bootrec\fixboot
This is really the answer to the question "how to remove Grub and restore Windows boot loader?", and it works. But there is a much simpler way. You don’t even have to restart your computer. The Bootice utility allows you to repair the Windows boot loader and remove Grub from hard drive in a few clicks.
You can download the utility from softpedia, because everything on the official website is in Chinese. Just choose the correct bit size for your system. Launch the utility, highlight the drive on which you have Grub installed, then click the button Process MBR:
Then Windows NT 5.x/6.x MBR:
And press the button Config/Install:
And that's it: you were able to successfully remove the Grub bootloader completely. You can reboot and check.
How to remove Grub bootloader in UEFI
This problem can also be solved using the Bootice utility. Only this time you need the 64-bit version of the program.
One of the advantages of UEFI on MBR is that you can install several boot loaders on a special partition at once. To remove the Grub boot loader and restore Windows functionality, simply move Grub a little lower in the UEFI boot queue.
Open the program, go to the UEFI tab and click Edit Boot Enteries. The following window will open:
Here you have two options. Or lower Grub below the Windows bootloader using the button Down, or completely delete the bootloader entry using the button Del. But in both cases, the bootloader files will remain on the disk. You need to completely remove the Grub boot loader with all its files from the command line. This is a bit of a complicated process, but we'll break it down anyway.
Click in the lower left corner of the screen with the right mouse button, in the opened context menu select Command line on behalf of administrator.
Then look at the available disks:
And we select our only disk on which Windows is now installed, and Ubuntu was previously installed:
Once the disk has been selected, we can view the list of partitions on it:
Among these partitions there is also a section with EFI files; it is hidden for a normal system, but not for this utility. In our case, this is Volume 2. As a rule, this is a small partition with the FAT32 file system and marked as system.
We selected this section as current using the command:
Then we’ll assign a letter to it so we can work with it:
assign letter=D:
Go to the EFI folder:
Delete the folder with the Ubuntu boot loader files:
Done: Grub boot loader removal is complete and its files are no longer on the system.
How to remove Grub from a flash drive
Flash drives typically use the MBR partition table. To remove the Grub bootloader from a flash drive, it is not enough to simply format it. The bootloader is written to the MBR table, so we will have to recreate it. I strongly do not recommend using this method to remove the Grub bootloader from your hard drive, because you will lose all your data.
We will work in Linux system. First, look at the device name of your flash drive, for example, using the Gparted program or in the terminal with the command:
Then we will completely delete the existing partition table:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc count=512
Now, using the same Gparted, we create a new partition table:
Create a partition on the flash drive and format it in file system FAT32:
Now you know how to remove MBR from a flash drive, just don’t erase it from your hard drive, because it will be difficult to restore later.
conclusions
I don't know why you needed to uninstall Linux. This is an excellent operating system, although there are still hardware that it does not support or does not fully support. Don't give up quickly: if Linux doesn't work on one device, maybe in the future you'll get another computer or the kernel will start supporting your laptop. Try and experiment. In any case, now you know how to remove Grub from your hard drive. If you have any questions, ask in the comments.
Buying a high-quality flash drive, like Transcend JF620, you can run into bells and whistles like SecureDrive-areas with unnecessary things for you software. And a reasonable question arises: how to get rid of this goodness that has fallen on your head.
Messing around with deleting the core partition using the flasher AlcorMP, too troublesome and dreary business. Even I am often too lazy to select a compatible version, then configure it and wait for the flash drive to flash.
But there are elementary ways by which you can delete something in seconds without picking up anything. CDROM-area from a flash drive.
In this article we will consider three main tools used to solve this problem. On my own behalf, I will say that the second of them is closest to me, where we work through Alcor QCTool.
The simplest utility, but at the same time, not very effective. With the removal itself CD- section, she copes with a solid five. Only its volume does not add back to what is available to us, which is not very fair. And the methods of subsequent format discussed below through Rufus and similar utilities do not solve the problem.
If you like this option, you can download the distribution from the following link -.
There is no point in selecting the version of the utility; we just take the latest archive. Incompatible flash drives will be marked by the utility itself with an error written in red.
To RESET CDROM-section, enough in the settings QCTOOL activate option Reset UFD.
And How only the utility will detect the flash drive, it will delete this section on its own. You don't even need a button Start no need to press, just the fact that the software has detected it is enough!
As a result, we get a drive with a size equal to the volume of the flash drive, minus the volume CDROM-section. To return the disk to its full capacity, you need to additionally enable formatting. (bird Format) . Then perform this formatting by pressing the button Start, in the main window of the utility.
As you can see from the screenshot, the format procedure took me only 8 seconds.
You can use other tools for formatting, they do a great job free utilities And HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool. If you are interested, built into the operating system Windows 7 is a classic utility for performing formatting, then it is too tough to cope with the task of returning the full volume.
ALCORMP AND FCMPTOOL
At first glance it may seem that to remove CDROM-parts must be performed. In fact, everything is much simpler and safer for the flash drive itself.
The disk drive will be reset automatically if you just run it, connect the flash drive and wait for it to be identified in the utility. After distorting the flash drive into USB-port, from the past SDROME there will be nothing left. In fact, the function is simply carried out Reset UFD, which we discussed earlier in the paragraph about QCTOOL.
The attempt may fail. In some cases, a hidden partition on the drive is to blame for this result. Remove it from removable media is a completely obvious solution, but there is one catch - do it using the utility Disk Management will not work, since functions designed to work with the volume are blocked for some reason. Fortunately, there is another way to delete partitions on a flash drive in Windows. It is described in this guide.
Removing partitions on a USB flash drive using DISKPART
For removing hidden sections from a flash drive is perfect. With its help you can call the DiskPart utility, which provides the ability to manage removable drives and hard drives connected to the computer.
Important: Before performing all actions, copy all important files from the flash drive.
Now all you have to do is format the drive. You can do this like this: standard means operating system, and the DiskPart utility. If you chose the second option, you need to do the following:
We hope that this method helped you figure out the error that prevented you from creating a bootable USB drive with files for Windows installations 10 and 8 or make a USB flash drive with Windows To Go. If the problem still persists, we recommend that you use another removable media or try to re-download the system ISO image. You can find out about this using a separate guide.
