...De-Etching? Restoring a flash drive to it's original state

balenaEtcher
1

Okay, so I used this a couple weeks ago to make a Linux Mint Live Stick. Worked fine and I thought I was done with it, so I deleted the Linux and was going to use it as a plain Flash stick after that.

This has led to two problems

  1. Turns out I need to reinstall Mint and now I need to remake the Live Stick.

  2. I would just do this, but the stick now shows two drives. One near full sized, and a tiny one labeled efi.

I’ve tried formatting the drive to integrate the two partitions, but that has done squat. I don’t want to re-etch another Mint drive and end up with a second efi thing on it.

Is there a way thought Etcher, (or some other program?) to fix this? Or is there a better path to take?

I’m running Windows 10 and installing Mint into VMware Workstation if that helps.

Thanks,
Tourma

2

Hi @tourma!

Your stick is showing as two drives because the Mint image flashed to it contains two disk partitions. If you need to restore the stick to its original (single partition) state, please take a look at our Etcher broke my USB stick … or did it? post.

I hope this helps!

4

That was it exactly! I was trying to use the more tradtional formatting tools and it wasn’t working, but this got it back to a single partition.

Now to reEtch and get Mint back as a VM. I really miss the music program. It takes about a fifth as long to rip a CD as iTunes for Windows, (which I use as a legacy thing from back when I had a Mac and an iPod.)

Thank you very much. <3