How can I merge two USB drive partitions into one?

Question

My USB drive has two partitions as shown by Nautilus File Manager. Gparted, however, only displays one. Moreover, $ sudo fdisk -l only shows my internal drive (sda) but not my USB drive (which should be sdb).

How can I merge these two partitions back into just one?

Solution

Try clearing the whole drive(please triple check that the sdb is really the USB stick first):

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

Then use Gparted to create a new partition table, and add one primary partition of FAT32 type to it. Don't forget to apply the operations.

Remove and re-insert the stick, and see if you can mount it and it's the expected size.

Comments

[Anders Olsson]

As far as I can see, Gparted show no partition on you /dev/sdb. But the "Ubuntu 14.04.03..." volume is supposedly on the drive? What is the type of USB drive? Sometimes they have fancy features, with hidden partitions, for apps, crypto, or so.

[mikewhatever]

Format my USB drive, it will create a new partition table and a filesystem.

[orschiro]

Dear @AndersOlsson, thank you very much for your comment! The drive is a normal USB stick that I previously used as a Windows 10 boot disk. How would you advise me to proceed?