Microsoft Windows, commonly referred to as Windows, is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families, all of which are developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. Active Microsoft Windows families include Windows NT and Windows IoT; these may encompass subfamilies, (e.g. Windows Server or Windows Embedded Compact) (Windows CE). Defunct Microsoft Windows families include Windows 9x, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone.
This is quite a common problem when you have a USB Disk that was used to burn a Bootable Linux distro is dd
mode. You plug in the USB drive in Windows 10 (or any windows for that fact) and all you see is a Drive with zero MB disk space or in some cases it shows “14.0 KB free of 2.35 MB
” message. It is annoying as Windows seems to be completely unable to recover disk space. Disk Management shows the full disk size, cannot format it. I could go on with the annoyances but in short all we need is to format Linux USB Drive to recover, re-partition and reformat that disk in Windows 10. In fact it works in Windows 8.1, Windows 7 as well.
The following process can wipe entire disk, so be very careful which disk you select and wipe clean.
Step 1: Run Administrator Command Prompt
On Windows 10, Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 search for command
and simply right-click Command Prompt
shortcut from the search results and select Run as administrator
. Don’t use Powershell as sometimes it can get tricky.
Step 2: Use diskpart to clean disk
Now connect your USB drive that you want to clean, reformat and recover space. SD cards, external hard-disks. etc. would work the same way. Just know that this process will simply get rid of all the data without any warnings.
Type in diskpart
in Administrator: Command Prompt and press enter.
Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.15063] (c) 2017 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. C:\WINDOWS\system32>diskpart Microsoft DiskPart version 10.0.15063.0 Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. On computer: RAZER-LAPTOP
List all the disk with list disk
command.
DISKPART> list disk Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt -------- ------------- ------- ------- --- --- Disk 0 Online 476 GB 2048 KB * Disk 1 Online 1997 MB 1996 MB
This is the crucial part. Examine all the disks, size etc carefully. From my output, it’s pretty clean that I want the second disk (in this case Disk 1) clean, formatted and space recovered. It’s only 2GB in size (it shows 1997 MB though).
One thing for sure, I don’t want anything to happen to Disk 0. So let’s be careful run select Disk 1
command. (in your case, you might be selecting other disks numbers.).
DISKPART> select Disk 1 Disk 1 is now the selected disk.
Almost there. I will take few more moments before I issue clean
command. It will clean the partition and make it available for formatting again.
DISKPART> clean DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.
I get DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk
as the response. Once you’ve got it, you can simply close Command Prompt.
Step 3: Re-partition and format
Run Disk Management tool
on Windows 10 or Windows 8.1 or Windows 7. Now simply right-click on Disk 1 and select New Simple Volume
. Follow the prompts and you’ve just recovered the disk space.
You can now use this USB to create a Kali Bootable Non-Persistence USB Drive!