32GB USB drive - how to fix partitioning on the drive?

Cammygirl192

Cammy White FTW
Member
I messed up a USB a while ago somehow, I forgot how I did it but for some reason it only allows 200MB of the drive to be read, although there should be 32GB of space on it.

The whole thing is partitioned to FAT32. I opened Disc Manager in Computer Management, and everytime I try to do something to the majority of the space (which is a separate partition for whatever reason) I get the error that I need to refresh constantly, or some other error...

PxYN.jpg


see G:\ drive on the console

How do I merge partitions when for some reason I can't extend or delete partition? Or any other edit to the larger one is causing an error?

Thanks...
 

My Computer

System One

  • Manufacturer/Model
    Packard Bell imedia s3210
    CPU
    AMD Athlon(tm) 7450 Dual Core Processor (2.40GHz)
    Memory
    2.00GB
    Graphics Card(s)
    NVIDIA GeForce 8200
Open an Administrative command prompt
Follow these commands and press Enter after each one

diskpart
list disk

You have to be extremely careful with this next command. Type the disk number of the flash drive. If you type the wrong disk number you will delete everything on that drive.

select disk 2 (Check the disk size to help you choose the the correct disk number)
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1

If you want to format the flash drive to fat32 the command is

format fs=fat32 quick

The only problem with the fat32 file system, there is a 4GB file limit. If you have a single file larger than 4GB, and want to put it on the flash drive, I would format it to NTFS. The command to format the flash drive to NTFS is

format fs=ntfs quick

If you plan to boot from the flash drive, you have to mark the partition as active. If you have no plans to boot from the drive, you can omit the command. You will not notice any difference if you add it or not. If you omit the command now, and later want to boot from it, you can pop in the flash drive and just add the active command.

active

assign
exit
exit

Now you should have full access to the 32GB drive.

One more note, if you ever want to boot from the flash drive to install Windows 8, 8.1 or Windows 10 on a computer that has UEFI (it is a form of the BIOS) the flash has to be formatted to fat32
 
Last edited:

My Computer

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