Recover lost space on a thumb drive?

June 13, 2010 12:04 PM

Recently I used a 4GB thumb drive to help a friend fix some partition issues on his laptop using Dell's Utility Partition software. It worked. However, once I tried to remove the software from the thumb drive, it sealed the space used by the software and I cannot seem to make that space usable again. I have tried using Norton's Partition Magic, Windows 7's Disk Manager, gparted, and a few others I can't remember. Any ideas?
posted by 29 to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

This has happened to me a few times. Whenever it does I take everything else off of the flash drive and reformat it. Fixes it instantly.
posted by makethemost at 12:08 PM on June 13, 2010

Formatting did not help, unfortunately. I tried that 5 times.
posted by 29 at 12:13 PM on June 13, 2010

http://imgur.com/4Atrp.png If that helps.
posted by 29 at 12:15 PM on June 13, 2010

If you right click that New Volume piece does it give you the option to expand the partition? Sometimes you can do it that way. Another option is to download a copy of Ubuntu and format it under the LiveCD.
posted by msbutah at 12:20 PM on June 13, 2010

Pretty_Generic solved the problem by suggesting I delete the primary partition instead of playing around with the unallocated space. It worked.
posted by 29 at 12:25 PM on June 13, 2010