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One USB Flash drive appearing as two on Desktop

atlanticza

atlanticza

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 18, 2008
563
2
Cape Town
My FD (Toughdrive) has two partitions: one formatted as MS-DOS (FAT32) the other as Mac OS Standard, hence the drive appearing twice on the desktop. I assume that it was partitioned by the manufacturer. How do I get rid of one of them as formatting clearly won't work? (It's irritating as I have to eject "both" every time.)
 
In your Utilities folder there's an app called Disk Utility which will allow you to reformat/repartition any disk you choose.

Just make sure the drive is empty first. :)
 
In Disk Utility, select the HDD name (above the partition names and probably mentions the manufacturer as well) and not one of the partitions in the left white pane. In the right pane, click on 'Partition' tab. From the left drop down list select '1 Partition' instead of 'current'. From the right drop down list select the FS. Click Apply!

Please backup the data the manufacturer ships with the drive!
 
Thanks, tried that as per your instructions but there are still two. (They appear in the DU as two drives, and of course you can partition either.)
 
atlanticza said:
Thanks, tried that as per your instructions but there are still two. (They appear in the DU as two drives, and of course you can partition either.)
Click to expand...

I those you see are really two partition of the same disk then you should have an entry above the two drive you see in DU. The partitioning should be done on that entry and not on the single volume entry.
To be able to do the instruction above you had to use the partition tab, which should only appear when you select the entry corresponding to a physical disk (the one above the volumes you see in finder). If you did partition each drive it probably means you have two separate disks on the same USB flash drive and it's normal to see two icons (although it's not usual as a setup).
 
Indeed there is, but there's an entry above "both" of them... same problem. Partition one and the other still exists. Thanks anyway for your advice, I think I'll just have to live we two drives!
 
atlanticza said:
Indeed there is, but there's an entry above "both" of them... same problem. Partition one and the other still exists. Thanks anyway for your advice, I think I'll just have to live we two drives!
Click to expand...

What?:confused: weird.....
Please post the name of your xHDD and the brand here!

By any chance.... do you know if it has 2 HDDs in it..... RAID capable maybe?
 
Hi,
It's not a HDD. it's a Flash Drive (or two)
 

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I got this on my old pen drive, the manufacturer puts recovery tools on one partition, and leave the other free for all your data.

On the recovery partition, the recovery app (probably windows only) will allow you to erase the recovery partition.

That's what I did, I had the same problem too, disc utility wouldn't remove the other partition because it came up as 2 completely separate drives...
 
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