Regain full capacity of USB Stick

Forum: USB booting
Topic: Regain full capacity of USB Stick
started by: Demo West

Posted by Demo West on Nov. 08 2006,10:48

This 250 MB USB stick has been partitioned under DSL to 50 MB active (drive I:). 196 MB have no volume name, but are free of errors. Can you help me to regain the full capacity of this stick under XP, please? I'm not able to do anything with the missing 196 MB that have no drive letter. It cannot be deleted or formated. If it takes DSL, how would I reformat this stick under DSL? I'm a complete Linux beginner.

Thank you

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Nov. 08 2006,14:14

Windows has that limitation of only seeing the first readable partition. Try repartitioning, hiding, etc.

This has been answered in some other threads.

Posted by Iang on Nov. 30 2006,20:21

The easiest quick way of doing this under DSL is to do a USB-HDD install. This will repartition the stick back to a single partition. Now Windows will see the whole stick again & you can delete or reformat from Windows.

It's a Windows stupidity (shock, gasp, horror) that it can only see the first partition on a USB memory stick.

Posted by roberts on Nov. 30 2006,22:24

And...It is a new feature of Windows XP as Windows 98 can see both partitions on a zip style pendrive.