How To Reformat a Partitioned USB Drive in Chrome OS
One of the challenges of Chrome OS is when it comes to partitioned USB drives. Let me paint the scenario for you. Let’s say you have a 64GB USB drive that you were using as your Chrome OS Recovery drive for your Chromebook (I highly recommend you create one if you haven’t already). Now let’s say that you pick up a small 16GB drive for a few bucks and decide you want to have that as your recovery drive instead as it is a more efficient use of the drive space. After all, a Chrome OS recovery drive only needs about 4GB of storage.
You create your new recovery drive and put it in a safe place. Now you plug in your old recovery drive and open it up in the Files app. There you will see the USB drive has two partitions: OEM and USB Drive.
Partitioned USB Drive in Chrome OS Files App
The problem is that if you reformat the USB Drive partition or the OEM partition, you will still have a partitioned drive. In other words, just like in Windows or MacOS, reformatting doesn’t get rid of a partition. You have to completely wipe the drive of data and partitions to get it back to one partition.
Fortunately, within Chrome OS, there is a quick and easy way to do this using the Chrome OS Recovery app itself. In this How To, I will walk you through the quick process to take that multi-partition USB drive and reset it to one partition that is the size of the USB drive itself.