Hi all. I made the mistake of deleting the partition on a Kingston 1GB Data Traveler secure USB stick, while under Linux.

When I insert it into a Windows box it now thinks it's a 10MB drive.
I have tried the HDD low level format tool (it says the disk is too small) and the HP USB format tool.

I don't need to recover data, I just need it to see all 1GB again.
Any ideas?

Thanks,
S.

I really wish people would stop using hard drive tools (other than partition type) on flash drives. They are 95% of the time of absolutely no value, and clinging to that 5% can cost you your flash drive (Which is usually worth what, $8, anyway now?) and a lot of wasted time.

Yours is an exception to the price rule if it's the model I think it is, with an integrated encryption processor, but it was $45 last I saw for the 1GB and $60 for a 2GB version. Its flash is divided into two areas by the onboard controller, the loader portion and the secure portion, like a Safestick drive, and somewhat reminiscent of a U3 device. You will not see two partitions in a partition program, and anything you do may erase the visible (loader/driver) section, causing inaccessibility of the storage section. They are a huge pain and sometimes impossible to work with and can only be harmed by using generic tools on what is a very non-generic device. It also has a lifetime warranty and Kingston does offer cross shipment/advance replacement. RMA it before you do something really stupid and Kingston claims you screwed it up.

EDIT: Must not have paid attention to your post in full detail before thinking about the nature of the device. You DID screw it up, as Mr. BlackST would say, period. Send it back or throw it in the garbage. It's quite unlikely it will ever work again. Unless you can correctly reconstruct the partition table entry for the partition that you deleted, which on a flash drive is not likely, nothing will make it accessible again unless Kingston publishes a tool to do that, which I can't find. I did just look, admittedly quickly.

Thanks for the reply.

I thought that might be the case. I had forgotten that this one was a secure device. I had done the same thing with 2 other devices without issue.
The reason I did what I did, was that the stick was used to copy some antivirus/anti-malware tools to a known infected PC. I was not about to pop the stick into a Windows box to format it, so figured it would be safe to do it on a Linux box.

Kingston don't appear to have any publicly available tools, but I'll contact support and see if there's anything available.

Ok, my bad, it's all ok now. I had mis-understood the person who gave me the drive. I thought it was a personal drive, not a company drive. Our company configures these devices as having 10MB unprotected, and 900 or so megs protected.

All I had to do was copy the secure utility on to the 10MB partition, log in, and there it was.

So guess I'm just another dumb noobie here on HDDGuru.

You are lucky that you could reload the loader partition. It is generally a huge annoyance to reload that information, because most drives set it up in a nonstandard way, sometimes using CDFS.

The "partitions" are mapped by a hardware feature which can be modified by the user through proprietary tools, but does not follow the standard partitioning scheme, and as such will not show up in a partition editor.