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I recently had to reinstall the Ubuntu OS on my computer, but borrowed my neighbor's USB in order to create the usb boot drive. Now, I'd like to return the USB in the same condition I got it in. How do I remove the Ubuntu files? I'm seeing 4 partitions on the drive for some reason. Partition 1 is the Ubuntu version, Partition 2 says FAT (12bit version) - not mounted. Partition 3 unknown contents, Basic data. (perhaps the files previously on the drive?) Partition 4 says contents: EXT 4 not mounted, type: Linux filesystem. Can I do this in Disks? enter image description here

Matthew
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1 Answers1

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You should delete all partitions from the USB drive and then reformat it the way it was formatted previously. The only problem is we don't know how the drive was originally formatted.

From what I have checked on a sample of drives that I have, USB drives usually come factory formatted in four ways. The first one listed is the most common:

  1. single partition formatted with FAT32 filesystem
  2. single partition formatted with NTFS filesystem (usually on large drives, over 128 GB)
  3. unpartitioned drive formatted with FAT32 filesystem (usually on drives of 16 GB and smaller)
  4. unpartitioned drive formatted with FAT16 filesystem (on very small drives, 2-4 GB)

If you have such a very small drive, choose the last option, as Windows sometimes might not recognize the drive properly if it will be formatted in other way. Otherwise, choose the first one as it's the most common.

You should probably able to do this in Disks, although I prefer to do such things in GParted as it's a much more convenient tool. GParted is included in live Ubuntu image used during installation, but is not installed by default to the disk, so you'll have to install it if you want to use it.

raj
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