Revert bootable usb drive back to normal on mac
I recently tried to create a bootable USB drive on my mac so that I could boot up windows 10. But, it did not work out and I just want to revert my USB drive back to it's original state. But in the process of creating a bootable drive, I used a variety of different processes to try and get it working. Of course the last one I used completely raped the shit out of my flash drive. So now I cannot do anything with it.
My flash drive was originally a 64gb flash drive. And the boot files take up 4.44gb of space. But now, for some reason my flash drive has a total of 4.48gb of space, and is using 4.46gb of it.
When i try deleting the files on the drive by dragging them to the trash, it says this: The item "boot" cannot be moved to the Trash because it can't be deleted. When i try right clicking, it does not give me the option to move it to trash. I've also tried erasing the disk from Disk Utility, but when i go to do that it says fails and says: Erase process has failed. Press Done to continue. I have tried mounting it with diskutil mount /dev/disk3, but it doesn't seem to do anything.
Can some one please tell me if there is any possible way i could fix this, or if i have completely wasted $40 and many hours of my time.
I am on OSX El Capitan version 10.11.3. Using a Macbook Pro model: A1398.
Answer
I spent HOURS researching this and trying to figure it out. The solution was easy in OSX:
- Insert the USB disk
- Open Disk Utility
- From drop-down menu, change view to Show All Devices
- Click the Erase button and select scheme as GUID Partition Map
- Click Erase
THAT’S IT!
The Erase option works slightly differently for a physical disk than a logical volume. When the physical disk is used then Erase partitions the drive with one volume then formats that volume. However, if you choose an existing volume then the Erase option simply formats the volume.