The other day I was looking to store some files, so I went and found myself a 128 GB USB 3.1 flash drive.
Upon inserting this into my computer (initially the wrong way up, and then correcting myself, as is the accepted method) – I was amazed to see it only registered as 32 GB
Whatever, I thought. I’ll just reformat this to the correct size.
But no matter what combination of file systems that I chose, I could not get this to recognize more than 32 GB
I soon realised that because it was FAT32 perhaps this was the reason. But how to reclaim the apparent lost space.
Over to Disk Management, where I seen
I quickly deleted the 32GB Volume.
To reveal the full quota of unallocated space
and I allocated that as a simple volume and re-formatted the drive as NTFS.
I found a few things out on that journey.
I could create multiple volumes of the same flash drive and each volume registers as a separate drive in Windows explorer.
But if you want to use the flash drive for something like re-imaging your surface – then it’ll have to be formatted as FAT32. Then you’ll be back to square one again and wondering where your space disappeared to.
I hope this saves somebody some time at some point.
Have a great day.
Cheers
Marty