Windows – USB drive not showing full size

fat32formattingusb-flash-drivewindows-vista

I have a 4GB usb drive. Just now i have formatted it with fat filesystem. But after formatting its only showing 200MB instead of 4GB. I am using windows VISTA operating system. I am frightened.

Can anybody suggest any solution?

Best Answer

I've had this problem before. I'm not sure what causes it, but I do have a fix. Here is what you do; be careful, this will format your flash drive or whatever drive you enter in step 3, so proceed at your own caution:

  1. Run command prompt as admin.
  2. diskpart which will put you into the Diskpart process
  3. select disk 1 (or whatever number that corresponds to your flash drive, unless you have other external drives or more than one hard-drive in your computer, this is almost always disk 1; to view all your disks use list disk when within the Diskpart process. It will show the disk # and the size of each disk found.)
  4. clean, which removes all partitions from the drive
  5. create partition primary
  6. select partition 1
  7. active
  8. format fs=fat32
  9. assign
  10. exit and exit again to close the Command Prompt window

This is what usually works for me, but as I mentioned before, be careful, I take no responsibility for lost data.

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