The other day I tried to format a USB drive for use with Windows. I had previously tried this on my Mac to no avail. But now even Windows was telling me that it too could not format my drive.
I was stumped! I had in fact never seen anything like it before. Was that USB drive broken? Had I turned stupid overnight? Well perhaps… but more importantly, it dawned on me what I had used this USB drive prior to this formatting nightmare: it was a Linux installation that could run directly from the stick.
This is important, because as part of the installation, a protected EFI system partition is installed. This is used for booting if I understand correctly, and hence rather important. So important in fact that the ordinary user tools in both macOS and Windows do not allow us users (even Administrators) to erase such partitions.
Lucky for us, the friendly folks at WinAbility have provided a detailed guide on how to remove such a protected partition on Windows. Enjoy the article!