usb stick

[kayzed1]

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.

[vtsteam]

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.

[vtsteam]

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/