My USB flash stick is showing up as two drives (two partitions), one large one encompassing almost all of the capacity, and one very small "UEFI_NTFS" partition, amounting to half a megabyte with the FAT16 format. I'm used to thumb drives showing up with just one partition, so I'm wondering how the second one got there. The stick was recently used to create a Windows installer using MS's Media Creation Tool, so perhaps that created the extra partition?
Ideally I'd like to delete all the existing partitions and just have one new one for the whole stick, however I seem to recall deleting a similar small partition on another USB flash stick a few months ago and finding that the whole device could no longer be read. If this additional partition is essential to the running of the USB stick, I will leave it alone, but I'm perplexed as most other sticks just show up as one partition. Can anyone advise if it is safe to delete the little UEFI partition, and what it might be?
The stick itself is just a regular Sandisk model (nothing special).
Ideally I'd like to delete all the existing partitions and just have one new one for the whole stick, however I seem to recall deleting a similar small partition on another USB flash stick a few months ago and finding that the whole device could no longer be read. If this additional partition is essential to the running of the USB stick, I will leave it alone, but I'm perplexed as most other sticks just show up as one partition. Can anyone advise if it is safe to delete the little UEFI partition, and what it might be?
The stick itself is just a regular Sandisk model (nothing special).