How to delete partitions on a flash drive in Windows. Guide to returning a bootable USB flash drive to its normal state How to remove a bootable image from a USB flash drive

The Grub bootloader is the default bootloader on most Linux distributions. Grub stands for GRand Unified Bootloader, it supports booting not only Linux, but also Widnows and DOS.

If you installed Linux, and then for some reason decided to remove it and return Windows, or created a bootable Linux USB flash drive, but now you no longer need it, you need to remove the Grub bootloader. In this tutorial, we will look at how to remove the Grub bootloader from MBR or from UEFI, we will also talk about how to remove Grub from a flash drive.

How to remove the Grub bootloader and restore Windows

If you have two operating systems installed on your computer, Windows and Linux, and you want to wipe Linux and its bootloader by restoring the Windows bootloader, and you have an MBR table, then this is very easy to do.

The network often advises a way: take installation disk Windows, boot from it in recovery mode and run the commands:

bootrec\fixboot

This is really the answer to the question "how to remove Grub and restore Windows bootloader?", and it works. But there is a much easier way. You don't even have to restart your computer. The Bootice utility allows you to restore the Windows bootloader and remove Grub from hard drive in a few clicks.

You can download the utility from softpedia, because everything on the official website is in Chinese. Just choose the correct bit depth for your system. Run the utility, highlight the drive where you have the Grub bootloader installed, then click the button Process MBR:

Then Windows NT 5.x / 6.x MBR:

And push the button Config/Install:

And you're done: you were able to successfully completely remove the Grub bootloader. You can reboot and check.

How to remove Grub bootloader in UEFI

This problem is also solved using the Bootice utility. Only this time you need the 64-bit version of the program.

One of the advantages of UEFI on MBR is that here you can install several bootloaders at once on a special partition. For removing Grub bootloader and restoring Windows functionality is enough to move Grub a little lower in the UEFI boot queue.

Open the program, go to the UEFI tab and click Edit Boot Enteries. The following window will open:

Here you have two options. Or lower Grub below the Widnows bootloader with the button Down, or completely delete the entry about the bootloader with the button Del. But in both cases, the bootloader files will remain on the disk. You need to completely remove the Grub bootloader with all its files from command line. It's a bit of a complicated process, but we'll go through it anyway.

Right-click in the lower left corner of the screen, in the context menu that opens, select Command Prompt as Administrator.

Then we look at the available disks:

And we select our only disk on which Windows is currently installed, and Ubuntu was installed earlier:

After the disk has been selected, we can see the list of partitions on it:

Among these sections there is also a section with EFI files, for conventional system it is hidden, but not for this utility. In our case, this is Volume 2. As a rule, this is a small partition with the FAT32 file system and marked as system.

We have selected this section as the current one with the command:

Then we assign a letter to it so that we can work with it:

assign letter=D:

Go to the EFI folder:

Delete folder with Ubuntu bootloader files:

Done: The removal of the Grub bootloader is complete and now its files are no longer on the system.

How to remove grub from flash drive

On flash drives, as a rule, the MBR partition table is used. To remove the Grub bootloader from a flash drive, it is not enough just to format it. The bootloader is written to the MBR table, and therefore we will have to recreate it. I highly recommend not using this method to remove the Grub bootloader from your hard drive, because you will lose all data.

We will work in Linux system. First, look at the device name of your flash drive, for example, using the Gparted program or in the terminal with the command:

Then delete the entire existing partition table:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc count=512

Now, using the same Gparted, we create a new partition table:

Create a partition on a flash drive and format it in file system FAT32:

Now you know how to remove the MBR from a flash drive, just don't erase it from your hard drive, because it will be difficult to recover later.

conclusions

I don't know why you needed to remove Linux. This is great operating system, though there is still equipment that it does not support or does not fully support. Don't give up quickly: if Linux doesn't work on one device, you may have another computer in the future, or the kernel will support your laptop. Try and experiment. Anyway, now you know how to remove Grub from your hard drive. If you have any questions - ask in the comments.

Buying a quality flash drive, such as Transcend JF620, you can run into bells and whistles like Secure Drive-areas with unnecessary for you software. And a reasonable question arises, how to get rid of this good that has fallen on your head.

Messing around with deleting the sdrom partition, through the flash driver AlcorMP, too troublesome and dreary business. Even I am often too lazy to select a compatible version, then configure it and still wait until the flash drive is flashed.

But there are elementary ways with which you can remove anything in seconds without picking up CDROM-area from a flash drive.

In the article we will consider three main tools used to solve this problem. From myself I will say that the second of them is closest to me, where we work through Alcor QCTool.

The simplest utility, but at the same time, not effective enough. With the removal of directly CD- section, she copes with a solid five. Only its volume does not add back to what is available to us, which is not very fair. And the following methods of subsequent format through Rufus and similar utilities do not solve the problem.

If you like this option, you can download the distribution from the following link -.

There is no point in choosing the version of the utility, we just take the most fresh archive. Incompatible flash drives, the utility itself will mark an error written in red.

To RESET CDROM-section, enough in the settings QCTOOL activate option Reset UVD.

And How only the utility will detect the flash drive, it will delete this section on its own. you even a button start no need to press, just the fact of software detection is enough!

As a result, we get a drive with a size equal to the volume of a flash drive, minus the volume CDROM- section. To return the disk to full volume, you need to additionally enable formatting (bird Format) . Then perform this formatting by pressing the button start, in the main window of the utility.

As you can see from the screenshot, the format procedure took me only 8 seconds.

For formatting, you can use other tools, they do a great job with this. free utilities And HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool. If you are interested, built into the operating system Windows 7 classic utility for performing formatting, then it is too tough to cope with the task of returning the full volume.

ALCORMP AND FCMPTOOL

At first glance, it may seem that to remove CDROM-parts, must be performed. In fact, everything is much simpler and safer for the flash drive itself.

Resetting the sdrom will be carried out automatically if you just run it, connect the USB flash drive and wait for it to be detected in the utility. After juggling the flash drive in USB-porto, from the former SDROMA nothing will be left. In fact, the function is simply implemented Reset UVD, which we discussed earlier in the section on QCTOOL.

There are many instructions on our website on how to make a bootable flash drive from a regular flash drive (for example, to install Windows). But what if you need to restore the flash drive to its previous state? This is the question we will try to answer today.

The first thing to note is that banal formatting will not be enough. The fact is that during the transformation of a flash drive into a bootable one, a special service file is written to the memory sector inaccessible to the user, which cannot be erased by conventional methods. This file forces the system to recognize not the actual size of the flash drive, but the amount occupied by the system image: for example, only 4 GB (Windows 7 image) out of, say, 16 GB (actual capacity). As a result, only these 4 gigabytes can be formatted, which, of course, is not suitable.

There are several solutions to this problem. The first is to use specialized software designed to work with drive partitioning. Second, use the built-in Windows tools. Each option is good in its own way, so let's look at them.

Note! Each of the methods described below involves formatting a flash drive, which will cause the deletion of all data on it!

Method 1: HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool

To terminate the process gracefully, type exit and close the command prompt. If you did everything right, your flash drive will return to a healthy state.

Despite its cumbersomeness, this method is good with an almost 100% guarantee of a positive result in most cases.

The methods described above are the most convenient for the end user. If you know alternatives, please share them in the comments.

It may fail when trying. In some cases, the hidden partition on the drive is to blame for this result. Delete it from removable media is a quite obvious solution, but there is one catch - to do it using the utility Disk Management will not work, because the functions designed to work with the volume are blocked for some reason. Fortunately, there is another way to delete partitions on a flash drive in Windows. It is listed in this guide.

Deleting partitions on a USB flash drive using DISKPART

For removing hidden sections perfect for a flash drive. With its help, you can call the DiskPart utility, which provides the ability to manage removable drives and hard drives connected to the computer.

Important: Before performing all the steps, copy all important files from the USB flash drive.

Now you have to format the drive. You can do it like standard means operating system and the DiskPart utility. If you chose the second option, you need to do the following:

We hope that this method helped you deal with the error due to which it was not possible to create a bootable USB drive with files for Windows installation 10 and 8 or make a flash drive with Windows To Go. If the problem still persists, we recommend that you use another removable media or try re-downloading the ISO image of the system. You can find out more with the help of a separate guide.