How to delete a CDFS partition on a hard drive?

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I need a DISK DRIVE GURU to help with this one…

I bought a Clickfree 1TB Automatic Backup external hard drive. My mistaken belief that the backups created would be images of the source drives soon became apparent. I don’t want to back up data files; I want to make full drive images of 4 different PCs and store them on the external drive.

When I looked at the Clickfree drive, I saw that it had a 46MB partition at the front that is formatted as CDFS. The rest of the drive was formatted as a large NTFS partition. When I plugged the drive in to my USB port, Vista (64) saw the CDFS partition as the K: drive and the NTFS partition as the J: drive. Fortunately, I had disabled autorun or plugging in the drive would have executed software on the drive to initiate a backup of my PC’s main drive.

So, I had the idea that I could delete the CDFS partition and then just use Acronis True Image Home 2010 to make the drive images I wanted. HOWEVER, so far, I have found it impossible to delete the CDFS partition. When I used Vista’s Disk Manager, it only saw the NTFS J: drive. It can’t see the CDFS K: drive. I also tried Paragon’s Drive Backup 10.0 Professional, as well as the drive format provisions of Acronis. Same problem.

I wrote emails to Clickfree and to Paragon, but they can’t suggest a way to get rid of the CDFS partition. Searching the web, the only discussions of removing CDFS partitions that I could find had to do with removing them from USB thumbdrives. In those cases, the thumbdrive maker (for example U3) had utility software to zap the partition. I could find no such thing for my external drive.

I would appreciate suggestions of techniques and utilities to try to turn this emblazoned hard drive into a regular vanilla external drive!

Thanks,
Dave

Who is John Galt?

Microsoft Surface Pro 3 with Windows 10, MS Office. Samsung Galaxy S9+ with Android 10.

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Hi Dave,

You can try the Diskpart command line utility to delete the CDFS partition. First you should do a image backup of your hard drive to be safe. You have to be very careful whenever you delete partitions or volumes. Click start>run> in XP and type in cmd, click ok and the command line utility will start. If you use Vista or Windows 7 click start and type cmd in the search box and click on cmd when it appears. Once the cmd is up, type in diskpart and press enter. Diskpart will execute and you will see Diskpart > on your cmd screen. Make sure you have your external HD plugged in and type in “list volume” and you will see all the volumes on your computer. Look for the one designating your CDFS partition and type in “delete volume X” with X being the volume number of the CDFS partition on your external HD.
When finished just type exit and the command line utility will close.

Hopefully this will get rid of the CDFS partition. You can read about Diskpart on this Microsoft web page, and here also.

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Thanks much for your suggestion, Gerald. I forgot to say that I tried Vista’s Disk Partition as well, with no effect on the CDFS partition. It could see it, but would not kill it.

Who is John Galt?

Microsoft Surface Pro 3 with Windows 10, MS Office. Samsung Galaxy S9+ with Android 10.

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Thanks much for your suggestion, Gerald. I forgot to say that I tried Vista’s Disk Partition as well, with no effect on the CDFS partition. It could see it, but would not kill it.

Reading some of the articles from this Google search, it doesn’t appear that anyone has found a solution to this problem.

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This is not specifically for HDD, but for smart flash drives. May help. Try Launch Pad removal Tool. Sorry could not offer further help.

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Yeah, I’d like to introduce you an article about your operations–Guidelines on how to partition a hard drive by Creating, Deleting, Formatting and Resizing Partition, I just finish the operations through the article lined, I promise, and you will find highly-efficient, easy-to-use and multifunction partition manager software–Partition Assistant Home Edition, this tool has free edition, you can make full use of it.

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I actually use a free app called Partition Wizardfor my partitioning needs. I do not know if this app will help with the CDFS partition, but worth a try.

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Hi OneDave, if there is items on your new drive that you want to keep, transfer them to another drive and use Acronis DriveCleanser to clear and remove partitions using ‘Fast’ option.

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Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I tried them all and could not kill the unwanted partition. I eventually took the drive back to the store where I bought it and then bought a vanilla 1TB external drive.

Dave

Who is John Galt?

Microsoft Surface Pro 3 with Windows 10, MS Office. Samsung Galaxy S9+ with Android 10.

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I know this comes too late for the OP, but maybe someday, somewhere, someone will benefit from it.

Trying to access a HD in an external enclosure to do things like was mentioned here, can be very problematical.
I’d just go “Old School” on that drive and I’d pretty much guarantee success.
First take the drive out of its external enclosure and connect it directly to a desktop computer.
I actually have an old PC that I use for things like this.
Boot up that PC with a DOS utilities Floppy or CD and run the DOS program FDISK against the HD.
It has an option to Delete Non Dos partitions. Just follow the screen prompts to select the partition you want to remove.
In this case I would remove all the partitions.
Then let FDISK set the entire drive as one partition.
At this point, my personal favorite would be to DOS Format the entire drive.
That takes a while, but the format command will check every sector on the HD for errors as it formats it.

The drive will be in FAT-32 format which is good for data storage, but if you have some particular need for it to be in
NTFS mode, windows will easily do that for you, once you return the drive to the external enclosure.

This is basically what I do with every new drive I get, or with old drives that are given to me or that I get from scrapped out PC’s.

Like I said, it’s Old School, but that’s what you get from someone who’s been doing this for thirty years. Works for me!
Sorry about that.

PS: There is also disk wiping software that will wipe a drive clean, partitions not withstanding.

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Format Clickfree Drive Using Active Kill Disk For Windows

1 – Connect Clickfree Hard Drive
2 – Go To My Computer
3 – Right Click On Clickfree CDFS CD Drive
3 – Click On Eject (This will shut down Clickfree Software}- “VERY IMPORTANT STEP”
4 – Start Active Kill Disk For Windows
5 – Select Clickfree Drive
6 – Click On Kill Disk
7 – When Active Kill Disk Is Finished You Can Now Partition The Entire Drive Any Way You Want.
8- I Did This After I Removed Drive From Case. I Do Not Know If It Works Connected To Clickfree Chip Board.

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You have two external partitions, and you have a drive letter for each. Go to the drive letter that is the NTFS partition, create a folder called ‘My Backups’ which just happens to be the default for Acronis, and then run Acronis with the destination X:My Backups where X is the known NTFS drive. Ignore the other partition for present purposes – it may come in useful when you learn more about it. Forty-six megabytes, for heaven’s sake? Such a fuss.

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EDIT : The Title Should Be How to Delete Clickfree 1TB CDFS Partition. Sorry

PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO READ EVERYTHING BEFORE PROCEEDING!!Gparted and third party partitioning softwares under windows such as EaseUs and Partition Magic WILL NOT WORK!!!!!!!! These Softwares will not work because the CDFS partition is in a write protected chip (NAND) and it is impossible to erase. THIS MEANS THE HARD DRIVE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS!

Before proceeding with removing the CDFS Partition, I will not take any responsibility of whatever happens, IT IS ALL ON YOU!!!!!!!!! YOU WERE WARNED

THIS METHOD IS GOING TO TURN YOUR HARD DRIVE TO A RAW FORMAT AND THAT MEANS YOUR DATA WILL BE GONE SO PLEASE BACKUP THE DATA ON YOUR COMPUTER

The PRO about this fix is that the CDFS will be removed and the CON is that the LED FROM THE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE WILL NOT WORK (THE HARD DRIVE IS STILL FUNCTIONAL) AND I DO NOT KNOW WHY. IF YOU CARE ABOUT THE FLASHING LIGHT, DO NOT PROCEED WITH THIS FIX!

IF YOU ARE AN EXTREME RISK TAKER OR REALLY DESPERATE, PROCEED WITH THE FIX BUT I STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU RETURN THE HARD DRIVE AND BUY A GENERIC EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE!

1. http://www.station-drivers.com/page/jmicron.htm click on this link and download the file that says “Version 255.31.3.41.22” (click on the floppy disk to download)

2. Extract the file to a folder (Recommended that you make one)

3. Go to your folder where you extracted the files and run the FwUpdateTool

4. When your on the tool, Select the Clickfree backup drive next to USB DISK

5. If you see JMS539 next to chip, keep proceeding with the steps. “IF YOU SEE SOMETHING ELSE, DO NOT PROCEED WITH THE STEP OTHERWISE YOU WILL BRICK YOUR EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE”

6. Select the firmware file by clicking load file and selecting the BIN

6A. AGAIN, I WILL NOT TAKE ANY RESPONSIBILITY OF WHAT EVER HAPPENS TO YOUR EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE AND AGAIN IT IS ALL ON YOU.

7. Click run and when it says programming succeed or something like that, disconnect the clickfree hard drive and connect it.

7A. So what we did with the Clickfree Hard Drive is that we programmed the JMS539 Bridge controller to bridge the connection directly to the hard drive and not to the Nand Chip that carries the CDFS partition.

8. Now go to device manager (Start -> Control Panel -> Device Manager) and if you see another hard drive that you never saw before, you finished Part I of this method

9. Now for Part II , If you don’t see the external hard drive on Computer or My Computer, Do not Panic because your External Hard Drive is not formatted and doesn’t have a drive letter.

10. What I strongly Recommend for formatting External Hard Drive is to use a Linux Distro, GParted. However , if you want to use a third party formatting tool or use disk management, you can proceed with that . if you want to use my recommendation, here is the link to the iso http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php. And click on the Live CD/USB tab to guide you putting the iso on a cd or usb.

11. I will not provide steps on how to boot the cd/usb and how to format the clickfree hard drive.

12. After you formatted the External Hard Drive with Gparted (Linux Distro), third party partitioning software or Disk Management on Windows, you are officially done.

For users that didn’t get jms539 next to chip, you will have to open the external hard drive enclosure and find the sata controller chip, write down the model number and use that to find yourself a solution because you can’t always depend on the internet on something like this. You have to start doing things by yourselfs and again not my responsibility if you screw up your external hard drive.

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The removal process is for removing the partition of certain clickfree drives. I have an older drive that has the same crazy frustrating software. Is there firmware that can remove this partition from the 100 gb drive. The firmware of the drive is 7.31. I have tried the firmware of the for the click free drive you listed but it would not recognize the chip on my drive so obviously it is the wrong firmware version. the model is HD701. Thanks for the help

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What about chip set JM20337…. is there a reformatting tool available for this one? It is in a clickfree 1TB drive

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