Formatting a USB thumb drive

[mrreizor]

I have a Sandisk USB thumb drive that has issues. I can only access 4MB of a 256MB drive. I had the drive in a NASlite box to be used as config storage. I need to use it with Windows now.

Under disk management in XP, it shows 239MB is unallocated, and there's no option to format (greyed out). What can I do to reclaim the majority of the drive?

 

[Sforsyth]

should be able to use disk manager to reclaim the space. maybe

 

[mrreizor]

Tht was the first thing i tried.

 

[Sforsyth]

ooops sorry.... Can you right click on it and format it in my computer.

 

[mrreizor]

yeah.. but it only sees a 4MB partition and formats it perfectly. I think it has to do with the ext2 partition (or whatever kind of partition Linux uses) that NASlite created when the drive was my bootable OS.

 

[corkyg]

Sounds like you are dealing with a hidden partition, or at least a non-Windows partition. Have you tried looking at it with something like Partition Magic?

 

[mrreizor]

I used Paragon Partition Manager and wiped it clean. Thanks for the idea!