I'm so confused...

[Marzipan]

I tried making a bootable Chrome OS Flex USB key yesterday and what I got is so messed up I'm thoroughly confused.

you install the Chromebook Recovery Utility extension, connect your formatted USB key (8GB min and mine were 32GB and 64GB, Sandisk and Kingston) and choose it from the list of drives available, then specified the Chrome device you had or selected Chrome OS Flex as a general option and it does it's thing. then I get a popup saying 'format USB key' and then it cascades a dozen or so FIle Manager windows for that many partitions on the USB key.

checking the drive under My PC >> Manage shows a bunch of small partitions and a bunch of unpartioned space. It let me delete all but one partition marked EFI where it doesn't give me the option to delete it.

I Googled this and found instructions on using diskpart, which gives an 'no device' error when I select the offending volume and try to clean, etc.

now I have 3 USB keys (1x 32GB and 2x 64GB) that cascadethe dozen partition in File Manger windows with error messages and instructions to format or plug in a drive for the letter issued the partitions, which are not accessible in File Manager. I click cancel on all those pop ups and then the File Manager windows close.

what the heck has happened?

 

[Marzipan]

just plugged in one 64GB and it cascaded about a dozen windows and gave me these error messages.

also, but for the one partition I cannot delete, if I remove the USB key and plug it back in, all the partitions reappear and the whole cascade / error message thing happens again.

 

[Shadowarez]

looks like you'll need get a pre execution environment to format those usb drives. i use one on test bench to fix these kinda weird issues.

 

[JD]

I think maybe you have USB autoplay set to open file explorer perhaps? The partitions won't be readable on Windows as they are Linux (probably EXT4) based.

In diskpart, if you type "select disk #" (whatever # matches the USB) and then "clean", it should fix it. Then you can format normally.

 

[djbrad]

Another option is to boot a gparted livecd and then delete the partition from there.