MadModder
The Breakroom => The Water Cooler => Topic started by: kayzed1 on March 02, 2026, 04:36:38 PM
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Can anybody help: i have 3 or 4 usb sticks from Win10 loads i did on old laptops, just thought as now old i could maybe recover the 16Gig sticks, trouble is they say write protected when i try to format them. They do not have a lock switch on them..Can it be done please?.
Cheers Lyn.
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Yes, probably. But I use Linux so not sure how to do it from Win. If you have one writeable USB drive, you could possibly put a Puppy Linux or EasyOS on that, reboot to it, and then use the program gparted in them to reformat the others.
If that doesn't work a disk imaging program should be able to put a new image on it. EasyDD does that in Linux. Once re-imaged you should be able to run Gparted on it and reformat to any type of disk. Probably FAT32 to keep compatible with most thumbdrives.
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If you still run Windows, you can use a program called USB-Image-Tool to write an EasyOS image to a USB thumbdrive. Or any other disk image you might want by preference. Or it might be able to simply reformat the disk -- I don't know for sure, haven't tried it, because I don't run Windows.
USB-Image-Tool is available here:
Information:
https://www.alexpage.de/usb-image-tool/
Download:
https://www.alexpage.de/usb-image-tool/download/