Freshly Formatted Drive, Space Used by...Nothing?

[MdX MaxX]

This is the strangest thing.

 

I'm trying to make a bootable Windows USB flash drive, which I've done quite a few times before.  This time around, however, I simply can't.

 

My flash drive is 4GB (3.76GB as displayed in Windows) which is just barely enough (by ~7MB) to store all the Windows installation files.  I've always been able to format the flash drive and fit everything on it before.

 

But this time, I'm trying to do it on Windows 8.1, and when I format the drive, there ends up being used space.  About 50MB worth, sometimes 100MB depending on what I do.  This makes it impossible to fit all the Windows installation files.

 

Trying to track down the cause of the used space, however, has gotten me nowhere.  There's nothing on the drive, nothing hidden, and even when I enable viewing of System files, there's a 'System Volume Information' folder, but that only takes up 4KB.  There is absolutely zero trace of any file that could possibly be taking up 50-100MB on the drive.  And yet there it is.

 

 

What has Windows 8.1 done that automatically dumps a massive ghost file on a newly formatted volume?  How can I fix this?

[Tea1337]

It happens to everything. On my 16GB flash drive I formatted to FAT32 or something like that and I got 14.84 GB of free space. Rather than the 13.43 when I first bought the drive. And it could also be the format file, that is invisible.

[Godlygamer23]

You can try enabling hidden items to be seen.

[MdX MaxX]

Ah.  So it looks like this only happens when formatting as NTFS.

 

For some reason I thought a bootable Windows flash drive had to be NTFS, but I guess not.  I'll go ahead and used FAT32.

 

Still, I'd like to know why this happens in Windows 8.1 now when it didn't happen before.  I had previously formatted it as NTFS with no issues.