Allocate Unallocated space on a flash drive…
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Lordhowe
105 pts.
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Q:
Allocate Unallocated space on a flash drive...
Flash drive, Thumb Drive Formatting, NTFS, FAT
I recently downloaded a Dell diagnostic tool to my flash drive. It converted it from an 8GB NTFS drive to a 2GB FAT drive with 6GB of unallocated space.

I thought this was fine at the time as I planned to simply convert it back to NTFS and reallocate the memory. However, I'm unable to recover the unallocated disk space. I can convert it to NTFS again with no issues, but disk management still shows the drive as 2GB allocated (active) and 6GB unallocated space. There are no options to recover the space that I can see. The only thing I can do with the 6GB is view the properties of it; formatting the main 2GB doesn't do anything.

How can I recover this unallocated space to turn my flash drive back into the 8GB drive that it should be??

Thanks,

Lordhowe



Software/Hardware used:
Kingston 8GB DTI Data Traveller
ASKED: Sep 9 2009  6:14 PM GMT
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Pjb0222
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The Dell diagnostic utility created a FAT 16 partition on your flash drive which is limited to 2 GB. You can delete and recreate as below, add another partition or convert to FAT 32 / NTFS and use partitioning tools to extend the partition. My preference is to repartition as the cleanest approach.

If you want to keep the diagnostices, convert to FAT 32 and extend the partition. This assumes that the diagnostics is based on a FAT 32 aware OS version.

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Start by removing the partition from the drive all together so the entire 8gb shows up as free space. You can do this by opening disk management from Windows (2000, XP, Vista, 7). Right click the partition and choose delete partition.

Now you will have the 8gb shown as unallocated. Right click on that and choose Create partition choose NTFS and allow it to format the drive.

You will now be able to use the entire 8gb as a single partition.
Last Answered: Sep 10 2009  2:44 PM GMT by Pjb0222   1110 pts.
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Lordhowe   105 pts.  |   Sep 10 2009  3:41PM GMT

Unfortunately, the option to delete the partition is greyed out. I’m running as an admin on the machine as well, so I’m not sure why it won’t let me do it.

 

Labnuke99   26290 pts.  |   Sep 10 2009  8:24PM GMT

I had something similar happen but it was a flash drive I received from a company with a utility on it that created encrypted partitions. I wanted to use the whole flash drive also and get rid of the partition & utility. It took me quite a bit of research but I was finally able to remove the utility partition and get a full 2GB flash drive. Not sure if it will work on the 8GB model you have but I used a utility called ChipGenius that helped me through the process. The primary source for this application seems to be a Chinese website so you might consider using Google translate to read the content. This utility in combination with another utility it recommended permitted me to do a low level format of the USB key and now I have a full 2GB key. A good article about repairing/reflashing a USB flash drive process can be found here.

 

Sonotsky   660 pts.  |   Sep 11 2009  1:20PM GMT

Could one not use something like GPartEd to convert the FAT16 partition to FAT32 and grow it?

 
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