0

Just as the title says, I have a USB flash drive (16 Gb) that seems to have lost ~2 Gb. Both Windows Disk Managment and DiskPart agree that there's only 14 Gb be had, but I know it had more when I bought it.

I had put an OS image on it as recovery media previously, but I had thought a simple reformat and once-over with Disk Management or DiskPart would be enough.

enter image description here

enter image description here

Basically, What's going on here?

CoilKid
  • 121
  • 1
  • 1
  • 4
  • 1
    Base 10 and base 2. 16 billion bytes is not equal to 16 gigabytes. – GiantTree May 31 '17 at 16:15
  • @GiantTree Okay? How does that affect my situation? I feel as though it could be entirely relevant, but without further explanation, I don't see the connection. – CoilKid May 31 '17 at 16:23
  • @Ramhound Ah, so is there an "easy" way to switch it back? I would prefer to get my flash drive back in factory condition, but I've never heard of computer file systems switching bases on the user. – CoilKid May 31 '17 at 17:23
  • That might also explain why a small file I tried to copy over was taking so long.... – CoilKid May 31 '17 at 17:23
  • 1
    Relevant: [Why do hard disk drives sizes come in multiples of 100, while flash memory drives sizes are generally multiples of 2?](https://superuser.com/questions/840669/why-do-hard-disk-drives-sizes-come-in-multiples-of-100-while-flash-memory-drive) – Ramhound May 31 '17 at 17:25
  • 1
    @CoilKid - Your problem is something other then base 10 vs base 2. Its very likely the device is fake. Which is the reason it originally reported a different size, and once you wrote data to it, after a format the size decreased. As for the reason writting data to it is slow, that also, can be explained by a fake drive. There is no way to "go back" to the factory setting if thats the case, even if this was a base 10 vs base 2 issue, that still wouldn't be possible, – Ramhound May 31 '17 at 17:26
  • @Ramhound Unless Office Depot is in the habit of selling fake Kinston flash drives, I doubt that it's fake. It was working fine two weeks ago. If there're any hardware issues, it could simply be failing. Also, I've had/used this drive since mid-2014 without issues. – CoilKid May 31 '17 at 17:29
  • @Ramhound Well, I guess if there's nothing to be done then that's that. Thanks for all the assistance. – CoilKid May 31 '17 at 17:34
  • 1
    Flash drives wear out. As they wear out the cells that are no longer are valid are retired. As this happens the drive stops trying to use them. This process would also result in the size of the drive decreasing and additionally explain the performance problems. – Ramhound May 31 '17 at 17:35
  • 1
    Also related:  [16 GB USB flash drive capacity down to 938 MB](//superuser.com/q/752874/354511), [Flash disk capacity turns from 32 GB to 4 MB](//superuser.com/q/937410/354511), [USB drive not showing full size](//superuser.com/q/88509/354511), [16 GB USB flash drive shows as 16 MB and is unusable](//superuser.com/q/50207/354511), [1 GB space left after formatting a 16 GB flash drive](/q/339489/354511), [16 GB USB flash drive turned to 1 GB after writing an ISO image onto it](/q/759602/354511), and [Toshiba pendrive shows 4 MB instead of 8 GB; what could have happened to it?](/q/927680/354511) – G-Man Says 'Reinstate Monica' Jun 01 '17 at 22:06

1 Answers1

0

Type these commands in Command Prompt with adminstrator

diskpart select disk 1 clean create partition primary format fs=fat32 quick

See commands info:: https://ss64.com/nt/diskpart.html

Biswapriyo
  • 10,831
  • 10
  • 47
  • 78