Formatting an invisible drive

[timothy42b]

I have a need for an external drive to back up some email, and I can't use my main backup for various reasons. It has to be encrypted and work with Win10.

Digging through the drawers I came across a USB drive enclosure I used many years ago to recover some data from one of my children's laptops. For whatever reason I must have tried to turn it into a Linux boot disc. So it's formatted to ext4. It seems to function. I tried writing a file to it and reading it from my Linux Mint machine.

None of my Windows machines can see it. Well, they beep like they connected, the Win7 machine shows it in Devices but not File Explorer, and Win10 won't show it at all. But both show it when I Safely Remove Hardware.

So how do I change the format from ext4 to NTFS? I attempted it in Linux Mint but failed.

[bbocaner]

in the run box type diskmgmt.msc. You should see the drive in the list down in the bottom half. You should be able to right click on any existing non-Windows-compatible partitions and delete them and then create and format new Windows partitions.

[timothy42b]

Nope, it shows the hard drive and the CD drive but not the external.

[sacfxdx]

Check the options for fdisk. there are options to wipe partition tables and format dos disks.

[JohnL]

Try this...

Install the Chromebook Recovery Utility app in your Chrome browser. Launch the app and click on the gear icon in the upper right corner and select "Erase Recovery Media".

BE CAREFUL WHICH DISK YOU SELECT TO ERASE!

This SHOULD wipe out all of the partitions on the flash drive an allow you to start from scratch.

[Burgerbob]

Nope, it shows the hard drive and the CD drive but not the external.

If it doesn't show up in disk management, it may be borked.

[sacfxdx]

Check the options for fdisk. there are options to wipe partition tables and format dos disks.

From the Linux side that actually sees the disk.

[boneagain]

So how do I change the format from ext4 to NTFS? I attempted it in Linux Mint but failed.

As others have said, your Mint machine is your best bet. Did you just try to change the format of the partitiion, or did you also try to change the partitiion system?

If you had partitioned the USB drive to be able to do Linux EFS boot the partition table is likely to NOT be liked by Windows.

In general, for this kind of thing I've gotten better mileage out of "gparted" under sudo than the default Mint disk utility.

But, yeah, start at the partition table level, THEN set up a new partition and format.

[timothy42b]

Dave,
good to hear from you. I thought you might weigh in, I remember you talking about apt-get once so your linux-fu is strong.

I'm only playing with this drive because I happened to have it, I'm trying to solve a backup problem on a laptop that has no CD drive and software that blocks thumb drives. I think our IT expert is going to provide a drive that already works but I like learning how to do things.

[BGuttman]

One time I had a USB hard drive (not a thumb drive) that stopped working and I was able to do a low level format on it. It's a scary thing to try because if it goes wrong the whole thing is bricked.

I set up a USB CD-ROM with an external case and use that with thin laptops that don't have their own CD. Another alternative is to find a dock station with a slot for a CD-ROM. Some of the older Dell and Lenovo/IBM docks were like this.