I have written a image on the usb by the win32diskimager,before I press write it said that writing to a physical drive may curropt the drive,i thought it may also not corrupt so i pressed write,after finishing my work with the usb,i format it but after formating the usb properties says 'usedspace-0 bytes freespace-256mb',how can a 2 gb flash drive change into 256 mb flash drive.?please help me how can i fix it ?is there any way to make it as like as before again ?
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Maybe someone sold you the wrong thing?– Klaus Byskov PedersenDec 21, 2010 at 9:18
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Related: How do I fix my USB drive to get its original 8 GB size back?, 16 GB USB flash drive capacity down to 938 MB, 16 GB USB flash drive shows as 16 MB and is unusable, 1 GB space left after formatting a 16 GB flash drive?, 16 GB USB flash drive turned to 1 GB after writing an ISO image onto it, and Toshiba pen drive shows 4 MB instead of 8 GB; what could have happened to it?– G-Man Says 'Reinstate Monica'Jun 2, 2017 at 19:36
2 Answers
Use a low level format tool to format the USB disk, here is one that might be useful.
Either use a low level formatter utility as suggested by @cartman or else boot a Linux system and reformat the flash drive.
The problem you are experiencing is that somehow what you did changed the partitioning and/or the format of the drive. Microsoft has a bad habit of being very self centered in the formats they recognize. If the drive got repartitioned and or formatted in some strange way that is a non Microsoft supported way, Windows really can't see the extra space. Linux is much more forgiving - it will be able to see the rest of the drive even if it can't tell what the actual partition/format is. Under Linux you should be able to repartion/and or reformat it. A low level format utility - see if your particular drive manufacturer has one on their website - bypasses all of that and goes down to the hardware level and redoes everything in some default format - usually entire drive, FAT32 for compatibility.
Obviously, remember to backup whatever you have on the flash drive because either of these methods is destructive.