How To Get Back Lost Space on A USB Drive

  

DID THE SPACE ON YOUR USB DISAPPEAR? READ THIS

The other day I was trying to mount a bootable iso image on my thumbdrive to install a Linux distro. Unfortunately, none worked but in the process my USB lost all its capacity in thin air. And what I was left with was just 255MB of usable space. I couldn't see the rest of space anywhere in the properties. I tried to find a solution and what I found is quite easy.

If you are in a similar situation, then follow these steps:

If you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7, start Control panel and switch to the "Classic view". Open "Administrative Tools" and start the "Computer Management" utility present at the top. Select "Disk management" from the left pane of the window. Select your USB drive and if you see that a large space is "Unallocated" then the solution is easy and your drive is safe and uncorrupted.

1. Make a backup of the data if there's any on the USB drive.
2. Click on the start button and type "diskpart" in the search bar and hit enter. A command line window will open up.
3. Type "list disk" and hit enter to see all the disks attached to your computer.
4. Type "select disk 1" and hit enter. In this case Disk 1 is your USB drive.
5. Once you have selected the right drive, type "clean" and hit enter. This will erase all the data present on your drive so be careful in selecting the disk.
6. Now, type "create partition primary" and hit enter. The unallocated space has now been reallocated.
7. Type "exit" to quit out of the utility.
8. Now open "Computer" and right click on the USB disk and select "Format" from the menu. You can choose the file system you want to format it in; by default it is FAT32. After formatting your USB will return to its normal condition with all the storage capacity restored.

I hope this was helpful, any comments are welcome.