USB Flash Drive Recovery Help

[Cyndre]

If you have ever formatted a USB flash drive to install windows on a new rig, the Media Creation Tool will format your drive to a proprietary format, that makes the drive have a maximum capacity of 32GB.

When you decide to revert the USB flash drive back to NTFS, You will only be able to select 32GB of capacity. If you used a drive with any capacity over 32GB, the original storage space will be inaccessible.

To repair your drive, follow these instructions. 

• 1. press Winkey+R.
• 2. type "cmd" and press Enter.
• 3. type "diskpart.exe" in cmd and press Enter.

*accept the popup, new window opens.

• 4. in this window, type "list disk" and press Enter.

*Find your disk, this is usually "disk 1".

• 5. type "select 1" and press Enter.

*before continuing, be sure the drive does not have any wanted files!

• 6. type "clean" and press Enter. this will wipe the drive of partitions and files.
• 7. type "create partition primary" and press Enter.
• 8. type "list disk" and press Enter. You should see that disk 1 now has the original capacity.

*Now that you have recovered your USB flash drive capacity, you will have to re-format the drive.

• 9. type "format fs:NTFS quick" and press Enter.

*wait for this process to be completed. after this is complete, you can close the command prompts.

 

Your drive is now repaired, and ready to be used as normal.

 

[ultimatemythbuster]

I will use this post as further justification that more people need to learn how to use basic command line tools.