Flash drive issues

[Beef Boss]

I recently bought a new flash drive that's a USB 3.0 and USB C duo 32gb Kingston drive. This drive today registered as two different drives with different storage sizes. Now the drive registers as a 8gb drive. This is the second drive that has had this problem and I'm leaning towards this is some user issue. Does formatting hurt them in anyway? This drive had partitions on it, but I deleted them. What are some things you SHOULDNT do with a flash drive?? 

After this bad experience with flash drives I'm considering using a HDD for everything. I'm getting tired of buying new drives all the time... This drive also gets warm from just being plugged in... 

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

8 minutes ago, BadluckBrian said:

I recently bought a new flash drive that's a USB 3.0 and USB C duo 32gb Kingston drive. This drive today registered as two different drives with different storage sizes. Now the drive registers as a 8gb drive. This is the second drive that has had this problem and I'm leaning towards this is some user issue. Does formatting hurt them in anyway? This drive had partitions on it, but I deleted them. What are some things you SHOULDNT do with a flash drive?? 

After this bad experience with flash drives I'm considering using a HDD for everything. I'm getting tired of buying new drives all the time... This drive also gets warm from just being plugged in... 

Not sure why you would have different partitions on a flash drive. I wouldn't install an OS on a flash drive for daily use. The only reason why I have a bootable OS installed on a flash drive is for troubleshooting. 

[kb5zue]

4 minutes ago, BadluckBrian said:

I recently bought a new flash drive that's a USB 3.0 and USB C duo 32gb Kingston drive. This drive today registered as two different drives with different storage sizes. Now the drive registers as a 8gb drive. This is the second drive that has had this problem and I'm leaning towards this is some user issue. Does formatting hurt them in anyway? This drive had partitions on it, but I deleted them. What are some things you SHOULDNT do with a flash drive?? 

Can't really think of anything that you can't do with a flash drive other than try to save a file to it that is larger than the drive capacity.  Obviously if the drive is only 8 gigs you won't be able to save a 12 gig file.  Just asking, where did you get the drive?  Did you pick it up from Target, Walmart or off the internet and if you did get it off the internet, where?

 

I would try to resurrect the drive by deleting all partitions, repartition the drive, then formatting.  I have read many stories posted by people that bought a flash drive advertised as 32 gigs to only find out after purchase the drive was only 4 gigs or 8 gigs so they got scammed.  Hope that is not your case.

 

Also, in the process of repartitioning, make sure there are no hidden partitions.  So called hidden partitions can contain such things as malware or virus and we all know you don't want that.  By repartitioning the drive before using, you guarantee yourself that it does not/did not contain anything bad.

 

The software that I use for such partition and reformat stuff is called AOMEI Partition Assistant and you can get it free from their website.  I have been using them for a pretty good while now and have never had any problems.

 

https://www.disk-partition.com/free-partition-manager.html

 

Good luck.

 

[Beef Boss]

Just now, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

Not sure why you would have different partitions on a flash drive. I wouldn't install an OS on a flash drive for daily use. The only reason why I have a bootable OS installed on a flash drive is for troubleshooting. 

I had it on drives to install it on a hard drive. 

[Beef Boss]

Just now, kb5zue said:

Can't really think of anything that you can't do with a flash drive other than try to save a file to it that is larger than the drive capacity.  Obviously if the drive is only 8 gigs you won't be able to save a 12 gig file.  Just asking, where did you get the drive?  Did you pick it up from Target, Walmart or off the internet and if you did get it off the internet, where?

 

I would try to resurrect the drive by deleting all partitions, repartition the drive, then formatting.  I have read many stories posted by people that bought a flash drive advertised as 32 gigs to only find out after purchase the drive was only 4 gigs or 8 gigs so they got scammed.  Hope that is not your case.

 

Also, in the process of repartitioning, make sure there are no hidden partitions.  So called hidden partitions can contain such things as malware or virus and we all know you don't want that.  By repartitioning the drive before using, you guarantee yourself that it does not/did not contain anything bad.

 

The software that I use for such partition and reformat stuff is called AOMEI Partition Assistant and you can get it free from their website.  I have been using them for a pretty good while now and have never had any problems.

 

https://www.disk-partition.com/free-partition-manager.html

 

Good luck.

 

Amazon and I'll be returning it probably. This had Tails on it, then tor and other programs. The thing is, the drive before came up as an E: drive and a F: drive which never happened to any other drive. F: is now gone

[RAM555789]

I would reformat the drive, reinstall windows onto it, get windows onto your desired HDD, then reformat it for normal use. When you use it as a boot drive that's the only thing it should be used for.

[RAM555789]

Also E: and F; are just different volumes that have been created because on what you have installed most likely to the flash drive.

[kb5zue]

1 minute ago, BadluckBrian said:

Amazon and I'll be returning it probably. This had Tails on it, then tor and other programs. The thing is, the drive before came up as an E: drive and a F: drive which never happened to any other drive. F: is now gone

Which drive letter it uses is really not important.  What is important is that it has the amount of space advertised.  If you got a good deal on it, fine.  For me, I would probably hang on to it after using the AOMEI software to delete the partitions and stuff and reformatting it to make sure it was good to go.

[Beef Boss]

7 minutes ago, kb5zue said:

Which drive letter it uses is really not important.  What is important is that it has the amount of space advertised.  If you got a good deal on it, fine.  For me, I would probably hang on to it after using the AOMEI software to delete the partitions and stuff and reformatting it to make sure it was good to go.

I paid only $20 for it, I'll try that software and if it works I'll keep it I guess

[BWLServers]

It's coming up as two drive letters because there are two partitions on it. Run the clean command in diskpart and repartition it. It'll be the proper capacity.

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

23 minutes ago, BWLServers said:

It's coming up as two drive letters because there are two partitions on it.

As far as I know, Windows can only see the first partition on the drive.  Or the first primary partition if the first one's a logical partition. 

To show 2 partitions, Windows would need to be tricked into thinking that the stick is a HDD

[Beef Boss]

29 minutes ago, BWLServers said:

It's coming up as two drive letters because there are two partitions on it. Run the clean command in diskpart and repartition it. It'll be the proper capacity.

It doesn't work... And it shows only one partition on the drive. I reformat in Ubuntu, doesn't work, Fedora doesn't work windows doesn't work... AOMEI doesn't work... 

[BWLServers]

2 minutes ago, Captain Chaos said:

As far as I know, Windows can only see the first partition on the drive.  Or the first primary partition if the first one's a logical partition. 

To show 2 partitions, Windows would need to be tricked into thinking that the stick is a HDD

The (Edit: 2nd latest) latest Windows 10 Creators Update has support for multiple USB partitions.

 

If you only see one 8GB partition on the drive in Windows Disk Management, then it must be that capacity.

[Beef Boss]

Just now, BWLServers said:

The latest Windows 10 Creators Update has support for multiple USB partitions.

 

If you only see one 8GB partition on the drive in Windows Disk Management, then it must be that capacity.

Well now windows itself doesn't recognize it and Ubuntu just doesn't like it. 

[BWLServers]

Just now, BadluckBrian said:

Well now windows itself doesn't recognize it and Ubuntu just doesn't like it. 

Meaning you don't see the drive in disk management? Or it doesn't show up in Explorer? Or it asks you to format the drive?

[Beef Boss]

1 minute ago, BWLServers said:

Meaning you don't see the drive in disk management? Or it doesn't show up in Explorer? Or it asks you to format the drive?

AOMEI sees it but it doesn't format it or anything. And it doesn't show up in explorer or even acknowledge it's plugged in. 

[BWLServers]

I'm not familiar with 3rd party tools nor do I trust them.

Using Windows Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc), does the USB drive appear?

[BWLServers]

1 minute ago, BadluckBrian said:

AOMEI sees it but it doesn't format it or anything. And it doesn't show up in explorer or even acknowledge it's plugged in. 

Forgot to quote you.

[NvidiaIntelAMDLoveTriangle]

Try low level formatting with it this:

http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-LLF-Low-Level-Format-Tool/

then a regular Windows format.