I was recently helping some students format a USB drive to run the Kali Linux distro. After formatting the USB for Linux the USB will not be accessible to a Windows system. Below are the steps to get it back to normal operations for a Windows system.
These instructions are assuming you are using Windows 7 or 8.
- Insert your USB disk into computer.
- Run cmd as an Administrator.
- Run diskpart.exe. Use ? if you need help in this program.
- Type: list disk
- Find the disk that corresponds to your USB disk.
- Select disk X where X is the number of the disk. Confirm that you're using the right disk or you will have a bad time. You can just type in the X number and it should select it.
- Type: clean (Warning: This command wipes the disk's partition. Any data on the disk will no longer be accessible.)
- Type: create partition primary.
- Type: format fs=fat32 quick. You can choose NTFS or exFAT instead of FAT32 if you want.
- assign. Assigns the disk a drive letter. I would go with NTFS is you are only using your USB drive in a Windows system.
- Type: exit to quit.
Enjoy your newly formatted USB drive.
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