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USB Sandisk 8 GB device showing as 200MB, how do I get my sandisk usb drive to read its full capacity?

Anonymous
2012-11-12T23:38:50+00:00

how do I get my sandisk usb drive to read its full capacity.

Original Title: usb sandisk 8 gb reads as 200 mb

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Devices and drivers

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  1. Anonymous
    2012-12-01T20:10:05+00:00

    It appears that the USB is getting reported by the OS as having a GUID Partition Table (GPT). You can check this by looking at the drive properties Volumes tab and see what the reported Partition style is listed as. If it does list GUID then you'll have to do some manual things to return the USB to a single MBR volume since the OS doesn't let you remove volumes on a removable media directly.

    1. Open DOS command box in administrator mode. In Windows 8, search for CMD and then right click on it and select "Run as Admistrator".
    2. At command prompt, type "diskpart".
    3. Type list disk to see your disks.
    4. You can also open the Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management and verify the Disk number of the USB drive
    5. Then type "select disk 5" replace the 5 with your USB disk number
    6. Type "clean" and this will remove all volumes on the current in-focus disk by zeroing sectors. As such any files you have on their will also be lost.
    7. Go back to Disk Management, and the OS should now report the USB drive with the near total size but as "Unallocated".
    8. Right click on the "Unallocated" for the USB drive and select New Simple Volume.
    9. Follow the wizard to partition the drive. Ensure you select File System FAT32.
    10. With a new healthy volume, right click and Format the USB drive. Since most of my USB sticks are now 4GB or greater I use NTFS as the format.

    Then remove the USB drive and plug it into another Windows 7/8 machine and it should now report the proper volume and disk size.

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  1. Anonymous
    2014-09-02T08:03:00+00:00

    I was having the same problem.  Learned something new today !!!  Thanks for the knowledge !!!

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  2. Anonymous
    2012-11-13T15:09:27+00:00

    Hi,

    Thank you for using Windows 8. I understand your concern; I will surely help you to find a resolution regarding the issue.

    1.       Do you have any data on the USB flash drive?

    2.       Were you trying to format the disk?

    3.       Have you tried connecting to a different computer?

    Method 1:

    I would suggest you to connect the USB flash drive to a different computer and check.****

    Method 2:

    If you do not have any data present in the flash drive, I would suggest you to format the disk and check.

    Try the following steps:

    **Note:**Formatting an USB drive will erase the data on it.

    a.       Enter the Start screen

    b.       Press Windows key + C on your keyboard to show the Charms bar

    c.        Type Command Prompt into the Search field

    d.       Right click Command Prompt (If you are using a touchscreen: Touch and hold your finger to the Command Prompt, slide your finger down until you see an outline around the tile, and finally release your finger from the screen.)

    e.        Click Run as administrator

    f.        Type format (Drive Letter): Example: format E:

    g.        If you receive any prompt to press Yes/ No press Yes

    h.       Once the Format is successfully completed type Exit.

    Check the size after formatting the disk.

    Hope this information helps. Please reply back with the status so that we could help you further.

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  3. Anonymous
    2012-11-13T16:53:39+00:00

    If your drive is encrypted, Windows will only see the initial, unencrypted segment.

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  4. Anonymous
    2012-12-01T19:41:21+00:00

    I just upgraded to Windows 8 and I'm have the same type of problem. The a 4GB drive is getting reported by the OS with 1 GB of free space. Formatting the drive does change anything. I had some other drives in raid to format so I went to look at the Disk Management to do this.

    I ran Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management

    It shows the capacity of my Sandisk USB correctly as 4 GB but that but with 8 volumes!

    Since this was a blank USB, I just went a head and tried to delete the other volumes but was able to only remove four of them. I wasn't able to put the entire disk into a single volume.

    I suspect this is a driver problem between the BIOS RAID, OS, and the USB driver.

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