How to restore a Cruzer Blade USB 16GB to pristine new condition (reformat)

Windows 8.1
Cruzer Blade™ USB flash drive SDCZ50-016G

Obviously there is a simple tool to restore a USB to pristine out-of-the-box condition ? Would be insane if such a tool didn’t exist. I’m very inexperienced with USB flash drive, practically never used them, so thats why I miss obvious things if I do.

How I messed up is less interesting than the solution, but anyway: I wrote a 1GB DEBIAN LINUX bootable image to the drive. Went fine, the writing that is, never tried booting. Then I wanted to write another slightly larger DEBIAN LINUX bootable image but I couldn’t because of lack of space.

Seems the writing caused a 1GB partition. Fine lets wipe & reformat should be simple …

Found the diskpart windows tool:
Command prompt (admin)

 

diskpart
list disk
select disk 2           # disk show 14GB so it’s obviously correct
clean                         # wipes partitions, caution, this is very dangerous, will just as easily wipe the C: drive if selected
exit

close command prompt
All partitions are wiped, in Explorer it shows as “Removable Disk (G: )”.
Windows can’t format, needs a partition I think.

Found this “Computer Management”:

http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/107/kw/format

If logging as in admin gives the option to “Create a Simple Volume”.

Will this work ?

Replying to myself …

This worked in restoring a FAT32 writable, readable, erasable (tried all) 14.9 GB USB drive.

Will try writing an ISO again later.

Command prompt (admin)

diskpart
list disk
select disk #                     # is the number of your USB
clean
create partition primary

Close Command prompt admin.

Followed by format from inside Explorer.  Rightclick on drive > FORMAT taking the defaults including FAT32 and 8192 sectors.

If anyone reads this, remember how dangerous ‘clean’ is.

Learned just now diskpart seems to be an XP command that might be near its end of Microsoft support

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415

Happy to hear of your success stderr.  Thank you for sharing it.

If you wish to run/boot multiple ISOs on the Blade, and without complications, I suggest you look at an app named Easy2Boot.  It is free, well maintained, and doesn’t required partitioning of your USB drive.