How do I fix my USB drive to get its original 8GB size back?

Question

My USB drive used to be originally 8GB when I bought it.

I'm trying to reformatted in Windows 7 by right clicking on the drive and selecting Format.... But the capacity only shows 250MB.

Is there something I can do to get the original size back? Maybe it got partitioned in a weird way?

The flash drive is a SanDisk Cruzer Micro 8GB. I got it from Wal-Mart but this is the same drive. http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruzer-Micro-Flash-SDCZ6-8192-A11/dp/B000UZN2ZK

Answer 1

You should try BootIce (the link to author's webpage is down, so you will have to google for it).

Answer 2

If something is wrong with the partitions then you need to change them.

• Open your startmenu and search for diskmgmt.msc to open the partition manager,
• Select the usb device
• Delete all the partitions you don't want (preferably the ones from your usb drive),
• Create one big partition (if you want to use it on other operating systems choose exFat or FAT32),
• Format the new partition.

Answer 3

There appears to be a problem these days with fake flash drives ( google: flash drive scam ). In many cases, the drive has been altered to report a higher amount of storage than is really there, and if you attempt to use it, you will wind up with lost data.

See for instance: ( http://sushifury.com/2010/03/i-got-sold-a-fake-usb-flash-drive-on-ebay-heres-how-i-fixed-my-situation-and-how-you-can-avoid-this-situation-yourself/ )

If you got it for a really good price, consider examining your flash drive more carefully.

Answer 4

When re-formatting the "drive" you're actually only formatting a partition on the drive. You need to use the DISKPART utility to remove the partitions... and create 1 single partition covering the full volume.

diskpart can be a bit dangerous, because if you pick the wrong disk/partition/etc... you can remove partitions/disks/etc that you didn't want... and lose all data on your machine... proceed with EXTREME CAUTION! I make no guarantees of any kind, and anything you do from here on out is your own fault.

Open up a command prompt as administrator (start -> search for "Command Prompt", right-click and "Run As Administrator". You'll get a black text-only window that pops up. type "diskpart" and press enter. You'll end up with a new prompt that looks like:

DISKPART>

From here, type list disk, and you'll get a listing of all drives on your machine. select disk # will select the disk #, and then you can list partition to get a listing of all partitions on the disk. If you're sure you have the right disk/partition... you can then proceed to do a delete partition # until all partitions are removed from that drive. Once they're all removed, you can then do a create partition primary to create a new partition that covers the entire drive. Alternatively, at this point you can create multiple primary partitions... of varying sizes as needed by appending SIZE=# (in MB) to the end of the create partition statement. Not specifying a size will use the entire disk. Once the partition is created you can exit and then go back to your pretty GUI and use the format option to format that blank partition.

Answer 5

Use this empty bootsector program if you want to reformat your device when you have written multiple partitions on you flash drive and Windows doesn’t recognize the full device size anymore. Just restore it in device mode