How To Restore Usb Drive Back To Full Capacity

[Violet Schoneman]

Itcan be frustrating when you are unable to use the full storage capacity of your USB drive due to various reasons. Nowadays, USB storage devices such as external hard drives, USB flash drives, pen drives, and memory cards play an important role in our daily lives. These devices come in different sizes, ranging from 215 MB to 1TB, and enable us to store large amounts of data, which we can take with us anywhere without any difficulty. However, sometimes an issue arises where a 64GB flash drive shows as only 54MB. In such cases, it may not always be necessary to buy a new one. The capacity can often be restored with a few simple steps.

"Lately I made a bootable USB drive on a USB flash drive for crashed laptop. I fixed the system problem successfully but a new problem arose in the flash drive. The problem is that the USB's capacity shrank. The flash drive used to have 16GB storages, but it is 2.19MB in Windows Explorer only after it is made as a bootable drive. There is large free space on the flash disk when I checked it in Disk Management. But I can't do anything to unallocated space. The size does not change even though I format the partition. Do you have any idea to restore capacity? Thanks!"

This part provides three solutions to restore USB drive backup to original capacity. The first method recovers capacity with the help of command DiskPart. If you feel this approach is difficult to you, you can try the second and third solutions which utilize a free third-part tool. Connect the USB drive or SD card to computer and you can try these resolutions.

Caution: The first two solutions will completely wipe the entire USB drive in question, please backup any important files before proceeding. Besides, please be very careful to select correct before formatting or cleaning operations, or you might wipe wrong disk by mistake.

The USB flash drive will show its full capacity in Windows Explorer after it is repartitioned to single volume. Another way to recover capacity is deleting all partitions on the UDB disk and then creating a new partition on it.

If your USB drive contains unallocated / free space, its size will be smaller than original capacity. In this situation, you can recover USB capacity by adding unallocated space to partition . It's recommended to use DiskGenius here again, as this software is able to add unallocated space to any existing partition on same disk without data loss.

In summary, there are various methods available to restore the full capacity of a USB drive. Firstly, formatting the USB drive can clear old data, eliminate partitions or unallocated space. Secondly, using disk management tools to reset drives can solve some firmware issues. In addition, updating the firmware or upgrading the driver of the USB drive can solve many other problems. Regardless of the method used, it is recommended to back up all data before processing USB drives to avoid accidental data loss.

Hey everyone, I recently bought a genuine 256GB SanDisk USB drive. Initially, it showed the full capacity of 256GB even after reformatting to ExFAT. However, after using it to create a bootable drive, I was shocked to find that the capacity had mysteriously reduced to only 6GB. I tried using Disk Utility to erase the drive completely, but it still remained at 6GB. The partition icon is now greyed out and unusable. I'm stuck and unsure how to reformat the drive and regain its original capacity. It was quite an expensive USB drive, so any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for your assistance!

It seems that your USB drive's size reduced after making it a bootable drive and you are unable to reformat it to regain its full capacity. I suspect you're not formatting the drive correctly. The following is the correct way to do it.

I initially used it to make a bootable drive. Now, instead of having a full capacity of my drive, I get a 6 GB. So, I tried to use the Disk Utility to erase the whole USB drive but it does not work, it still shows the capacity of 6 GB. The partition icon is greyed and I can't use it. I don't know what to do to reformat and get back the whole initial capacity of my (expensive) USD drive. Any ideas to how to resolve this problem? Thanks.

I finally found what was my problem, it is so simple. I had the wrong view of the storage media. The view that I had (by default) was about volumes, not the devices. When I changed the view to see the devices, then I was able to select the device (USB drive from Sandisk) and erase it and specifying GUID as you recommended. Thank you very much.

I am sorry for the misunderstanding, I don't want to boot my mac from a USB drive. Initially, I wanted to boot Ubuntu from my USB drive for Raspberry Pi. I don't need the USB drive for this purpose anymore. I just want to regain the full capacity of my USB drive and I can't do it with the Disk Utility.

First, review this introductory article: Create a bootable installer for macOS. Second, see this How To outline for creating a bootable El Capitan installer. Simply replace the Terminal command with the one from the preceding article by copying it into the Terminal window. You will need an 8GB or larger USB flash drive that has been partitioned and formatted for use with OS X.

Open the Terminal in the Utilities' folder. Choose the appropriate command line (in red) depending upon what OS X installer you want. Paste that entire command line from below at the Terminal's prompt:

Press RETURN. You will be asked for your admin password. It will not echo to the Terminal window. Then press RETURN again. Wait for the return of the Terminal prompt signifying the process has completed. It takes quite some time to finish. Be patient.

The Erase option works slightly differently for a physical disk than a logical volume. When the physical disk is used then Erase partitions the drive with one volume then formats that volume. However, if you choose an existing volume then the Erase option simply formats the volume.

If you want to partition a disk into more than one partition, then you choose an existing volume, click on the Partition button, then you see a different panel in which you can partition the volume.

You should try BootIce. BootIce is a portable, free utility designed to directly customize and fix drives at a deep level. It is able to edit, restore, install and backup MBR, PBR, partitions and sectors of drives.

CAUTION: Because of its powerful capabilities, using this program can render your drive non-functional. There is no Reverse option to recover from changes made through use of this utility. Always use caution when using BootIce and make sure you know what you're going to do is the way to what you want to accomplish before attempting to make use of its functions.

Verify the drive you have is the one with the problem. ATTN: Deleting partitions will erase all data. Make sure you back up any important files or data you do not want to lose before proceeding.

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.

This will provide a reliable way to create a FAT32 partition. On the drive you would like to format (NEVER TOUCH DISK 0!), right click and select format. The allocation unit size option should be default, and the File System option should be set to FAT32. The format may take a while, depending on the disk size, be patient.

diskpart can be a bit dangerous, because if you pick the wrong disk or partition, you can remove partitions/disks/etc. that you didn't want to remove, and lose all data on your machine. Proceed with extreme caution!

Once they're all removed, type 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.

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.

I've added my own answer to this because the current best answer is a long-winded graphical solution, and the only other command-line solutions are longer than they need to be or leave whole stages of the process to be completed in the GUI. This is currently the only pure command-line solution, and I like to think it's also a pretty simple one.

This is the first major difference to the other command-line solutions given to this question - listing, selecting and then deleting individual partitions is cumbersome, and when the purpose is to remove all partitions, it makes much more sense to use clean, which does the exact same job and does it quicker.

...to create a single partition covering the entire disk - this is the "default" configuration, suitable for most purposes. You can repeat this step to create as many partitions as you'd like. Remember that an MBR disk can contain a maximum of four primary partitions*.

Having restored the drive to its original size, you'll still need to format it with a file system to make it usable. This is where the other answers either stop short or delve into the GUI, but this part of the process can just as easily be done from within the command-line, and it makes little sense to go most of the way via the CLI and then use the GUI only to format the drive... especially when the command-line feels way cooler.

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