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

Response by poster: Formatting did not help, unfortunately. I tried that 5 times.
posted by 29 at 12:13 PM on June 13, 2010 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: http://imgur.com/4Atrp.png If that helps.
posted by 29 at 12:15 PM on June 13, 2010 [1 favorite]

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

Response by poster: 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 [1 favorite]