Write a mining OS image to a USB stick and Windows may never format that stick again. Disk Management greys the option out or fails partway through. The drive is fine. Windows just will not touch the partitions the image left behind.
A mining OS image does not lay the drive out the way Windows expects.
HiveOS and images like it write their own partition table. Some of those partitions are Linux filesystems. Some are flagged in ways the Windows format tool will not act on.
So you right click the drive and the format option does nothing useful.
This is not a dead stick. Nothing is wrong with the hardware.
Open Command Prompt.
Start the partition tool with command diskpart
Accept the UAC prompt with Yes.
A second window opens. You are in diskpart now, not the normal shell.
List every disk in the machine with command list disk
DISKPART> list disk
Disk ### Status Size Free
-------- ------------- ------- -------
Disk 0 Online 931 GB 0 B
Disk 1 Online 465 GB 0 B
Disk 2 Online 14 GB 0 BFind your USB drive in that list. Go by the size column.
list disk
again, and see which number disappears.
Select the drive with command select disk 2
Use your own number in place of 2.
Wipe it with command clean
That is the whole fix. It returns in about a second.
clean removes the partition table and stops there. The drive now has no partition at all.
Windows shows it as unallocated space.
Open Disk Management.
Right click the unallocated space on your drive.
Choose New Simple Volume.
Take the defaults and finish the wizard.
The stick comes back as a normal drive with a letter.
Any drive Disk Management will not format is a candidate.
Drives written with a Linux installer image.
Drives with a leftover EFI or recovery partition you cannot delete in the GUI.
Drives that report the wrong size after an image was written to them.
The image writing tool is usually what created the problem. clean undoes all of it at once.