merging multiple partitions on thumb drive

For whatever reason, my thumb drive got partitioned into several pieces making it hard to use. In windows you can do the following:

• open the windows command prompt
• type diskpart , it opens a separate command window
• type list disk
• identify your removable disk, you can confirm by going into Disk Management if you’re paranoid like i am
• type select <disk ### name>
• type list partition
• type select <partition ### name>
• type delete partition
• if you get a message like

Virtual Disk Service error:
Cannot delete a protected partition without the force protected parameter set.

• you can type delete partition override
• repeat the deletion of partitions until you have one partition

if you try to reformat the thumb drive at this point, you may see that it doesn’t allow for the full disk size, only what the remaining partition was allocated for. you can fix this by

• type select <disk ### name>
• type clean
• type create partition primary

you should be able to reformat for it’s maximum allowed space now!