InitDisk's technology was developed for GRC's next release of SpinRite. SpinRite needed a new, foolproof, hyper-robust USB drive formatter which could quickly, painlessly and safely reformat any USB memory device and make it bootable.

InitDisk is a simple-to-use Windows command line “console” utility that can also be run by right-clicking its icon and selecting “Run as administrator”. It will prompt its user to insert the USB device they wish to reformat, will display confirming information about the device, then await clear permission to proceed. If permission is given, the USB device will receive a fresh FAT format.

For maximum compatibility, InitDisk formats with an MBR and FAT (12/16/32) partition. Its maximum drive size is 2.2 terabytes.

Experience has shown that USB thumb drives believed
to be dead may be brought back to life with InitDisk.

File stats for: InitDisk    Last Updated: Size: 161k Dec 19, 2020 at 19:40 (1,448.82 days ago) Downloads/day: 25 Total downloads: 50,944 Current Rank: 12 Historical Rank: 31

InitDisk accepts one optional command-line token:

• freedos – when present, InitDisk will create a bootable USB drive with a minimal set of FreeDOS files. It will take the user's current keyboard language mapping into account, if any, and will add an entry for FreeDOS's keyboard mapper to the saved autoexec.bat file.

Release history:

• 2020-06-21 – Initial release.
• 2020-12-04 – Release 2:
  • Removed the “legacy” option in favor of always aligning its FAT partition with the beginning of the second disc track.
  • Improves FAT file system compliance by setting the minimum cluster size to 1K for FAT16 and 4K for FAT32.
• 2020-12-09 – Release 3:
  • Further improved compatibility by zeroing the first track in front of the first partition.
• 2020-12-13 – Release 4:
  • Suppresses Windows Explorer popping-up new windows at USB drive insertion and volume remounting.
  • Switched from the Windows 2000 to the Windows 7 Master Boot Record (MBR) partition table sector for increased boot compatibility with some BIOSes.
  • Deletes Windows' mount history for the drive to improve the new volume remounting.
• 2020-12-18 – Release 5:
  • Fixes an occasional source of write failure errors. Under Windows 10, previous releases might complain, at step 4, that the media could not be written to, even though its writeability had been previously confirmed. This was being caused by InitDisk attempting to reformat a USB drive with a partition table when the drive previously had none.