How to remove the boot sector off a USB flash drive?

[Mitz]

Question from an email to Tips4pc:

If I leave my USB plugged in and restart the computer the screen goes blank because it wants to boot to the USB drive. If I pull it out it will boot normally but it annoys me. I want to leave it in but remove the boot sector off  the flash dive. I want to make it an unbootable USB drive so I can just store files on it. I have tried formatting the USB drive but it stills boots up when I start my computer.

[Dak]

Windows will actually let you format a flash drive in the same way that you format a floppy disk. However, formatting a flash drive in this way will not work in the same way. In fact, using Windows to format a flash drive directly has been known to destroy some types of flash drives.

To format a flash drive, you need to use the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool. When choosing a format, since you just want to store files in it, make sure you choose the NTFS file system, to make it the same as the rest of the computer.

http://www.bootdisk.com/plan40/hpflash1.zip

The other thing to take note of is that if your computer is trying to boot the flash drive, then it sees it as something bootable. Only quite modern computers can boot from a flash drive. You can prevent it from trying to boot the USB drive by removing it from the boot sequence in the BIOS. Sometimes the USB drive can be recognised as a floppy disc too, so removing any reference ( both to the USB drive [may show up as a 'removable disc'] and the floppy), from the boot sequence should prevent it from attempting to boot.

[Merlin33069]

Another thing to check

Leave your flash drive plugged in and reboot, go into the bios

find a section that asks which hard drive to boot from first (hard drive boot order)

some motherboards classify flash drives as disk drives...

just another place to check, boot order should fix it...

[Dak]

didn't i just say that ?

[Merlin33069]

Lol for the most part,

You said:

both to the USB drive [may show up as a 'removable disc'] and the floppy

And some users would not realize to check in the Hard Drive section.... Just adding a little

[Mitz]

Yes this is all true but how do you remove the boot sector when formatting, even low level formatting does not work? I actually tried it on mine... The boot sector remains on the drive. The only thing I found is a small program that will remove the mbr. http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/ its called HDD Low Level Format Tool.

This freeware Low Level Format utility will erase, Low-Level Format and re-certify a SATA, IDE or SCSI hard disk drive with any size of up to 281 474 976 710 655 bytes. Will work with USB and FIREWIRE external drive enclosures. Low-level formatting of Flash Cards is supported too. Low Level Format Tool will clear partitions, MBR, and every bit of user data. The program utilizes Ultra-DMA transfers when possible.

[Merlin33069]

nice, i think i will download it myself

[Dak]

I have used that tool and it is very effective. I had a hard drive with a corrupted raid volume that nothing would even see to be able to format (not even G-Parted  ), but this tool worked a charm. Its only disadvantage is that it took nearly 3 hours to format a 320G drive, but thats only a minor annoyance.

I should have mentioned that one, but frankly I just didnt even think of it lol