I recently purchased a 64gb usb thumb drive, but for some reason it appears as two disks on every system I've insert it in. I've tried to repartition it in Linux, Windows, and MacOS to no avail. Here's the dmesg when I insert it in a linux box:
usb 1-6: USB disconnect, address 4 usb 1-5: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5 usb 1-5: New USB device found, idVendor=1307, idProduct=0165 usb 1-5: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 usb 1-5: Product: USB Mass Storage Device usb 1-5: Manufacturer: USBest Technology usb 1-5: SerialNumber: 09090388b7b0a7 usb 1-5: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice scsi5 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices usb-storage: device found at 5 usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning usb-storage: device scan complete scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access 0.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 scsi 5:0:0:1: Direct-Access 0.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0 sd 5:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg5 type 0 sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] 61440000 512-byte hardware sectors: (31.4 GB/29.2 GiB) sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 00 00 00 00 sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through sd 5:0:0:1: [sdd] 63995904 512-byte hardware sectors: (32.7 GB/30.5 GiB) sd 5:0:0:1: [sdd] Write Protect is off sd 5:0:0:1: [sdd] Mode Sense: 00 00 00 00 sd 5:0:0:1: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through sdc: sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk sd 5:0:0:1: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through sdd: sd 5:0:0:1: [sdd] Attached SCSI removable disk
Can somebody tell me how I can re-partition this thing to appear as a single drive? I've had no luck with any of the partition utilities on any OS because this drive doesn't appear as one disk with two partitions, but two physical disks.
UPDATE
The drive is a Centon ElitePlus.
I'm beginning to think that something is physically wrong with this drive. Can anyone confirm?
Best Answer
Here is the explanation directly from Centon:
Question: I recently purchased one of your 64GB DataStick flash drives, and I was surprised to find that the 64GB device was formatted with two partitions. Why is this? Can it be re-configured?
Answer: Due to a limitation in Windows 2000/XP/2003 computers, drive volumes cannot be formatted in capacities larger than 32GB using the FAT32 file system. As a result, to ensure the drive can be recognized by the most number of computer systems, our 64GB drive is partitioned into two 32GB volumes. The Windows formatted capacity is roughly around 30GB.
When the 64GB drive is connected to your Windows computer, it will be assigned two drive letters.
The drive cannot be reconfigured into a single 64GB partion. The partition on these drives is hardcoded into the USB-to-flash controller chip.
So no, your drive is not faulty. They decided that the best thing for you, the consumer, is to actually use two seperate drives. I would be mad if I ordered a USB drive and realized that the manufacturer created this restriction without any mention on the product description page.