Unable to create non-system USB drive (entire drive)

[Emmette Goodrich]

I want to encrypt an entire USB HD (as opposed to encrypting a partition within the drive). When I go through the process: Create Volume -> Encrypt a non-system partition/drive -> Standard VeraCrypt volume -> Select Device and try to select the USB drive (Removable Disk 1:), I get the error "The selected non-system device contains partitions." I prepared the drive using Diskpart->sel disk->clean to remove ALL partitions prior to attempting. I also notice that Windows assigns a drive letter to the device even if NO partitions are present. I used diskmgmt to remove the drive letter assignment and tried again with the same result. I noticed that the VeraCrypt "Select a Partition or Device" window shows the following:
Removable Disk 1:
\Device\Harddisk1\Partition1
even when there are NO partition on the device.

What am I doing wrong?
fp

[Emmette Goodrich]

Ok, I believe this has something to do with the way Windows initializes drives: even though I used Diskpart->clean to remove all existing partitions on the drive, AND any drive utilities I used showed that no partitions existed on the drive, AND the partition table in the MBR contained all 00's, VeraCrypt still insisted that I had a "\Device\Harddisk1\Partition1" and refused to encrypt the entire drive!

I finally got around this by using WinHex to fill the 1st sector with 00's (effectively erasing the MBR). VeraCrypt then displayed ONLY "Removable Disk 1:" and I was able to select it and encrypt the entire drive. I am not the only one with this issue; Trevor Golden asked this back in May:
https://sourceforge.net/p/veracrypt/discussion/technical/thread/8ad7ccc6/
and no one ever answered him...

I still have questions about doing this vs. just encrypting the 1st partition:

1. Is it more secure, less secure, or exactly the same (using entire drive vs partition encryption)?
2. Is one technique "safer", especially on large (>2Tb) drives (I saw some posts regarding accessibility issues on large drives)?

Thanx for any replies...

[David West]

I am using a USB HDD and I used Linux to remove the final \Device\Harddisk1\Partition1
I used "gnome-disk-utility" on a Raspberry Pi but I'm sure Linux on a x86 PC will be just as good.

It just seems Windows will not remove all the partitions