Need help with a USB key

gnolan

Hi,

A while ago i decided to use a 2GB USB key to run OPENELEC on my media center PC. OPENELEC only took up 178MB of space and formatted the USB to it's own proprietary format i believe.

When i got a different USB key for OPENELEC i decided i wanted to use the old key for regular day-to-day storage. When i went to reformat the key as FAT32 it formatted it with only 178MB of space, where there should be 2GB.

Is this a common problem and is there anything i can do to recover the rest of the space? Thanks

bonzodog2

Try deleting the partion in DiskManagement then create a new one and format again.

gnolan

bonzodog2 wrote: »

Try deleting the partion in DiskManagement then create a new one and format again.

I should have mentioned that i'm using XP. How do i get to DiskManagement or the XP equivalent?

EDIT:I see it here now. It says, 179MB Healthy (Active), 1.67GB Healthy (Unknown Partition), 14MB Unallocated.

The only option for the 1.67GB partition is to delete. Is there a way to combine all of them into the one partition?

LeakingLava

gnolan wrote: »

I should have mentioned that i'm using XP. How do i get to DiskManagement or the XP equivalent?

EDIT:I see it here now. It says, 179MB Healthy (Active), 1.67GB Healthy (Unknown Partition), 14MB Unallocated.

The only option for the 1.67GB partition is to delete. Is there a way to combine all of them into the one partition?

I've just done some partition delete/create stuff earlier and what I've done was, delete all the partitions of the drive (this was a hard drive by the way, and this partition things that I've done were done while I was on my way to install XP. It was done when I was asked where I wanted to install XP, so I am not too sure if all partition managers are able to do this). After that, all of the space of the hard drive was marked as unallocated. Then I created a partition using all of the unallocated space, i.e. one big partition. It should work.

Redisle

Yeah you just need to delete all the partitions and create a new single partition. You are unlikely however to be able to do this in windows. Windows treats flash drives differently to hard disks and refuses to support more than one partition. In the past I have always had to use a linux machine or a bootable utility like Gparted to partition flash drives.

Give EaseUS Partition Manager a try. I use it when I dont have a bottable Ubuntu CD with me.

Its free to use, and I find it very easy to use!

http://www.partition-tool.com/download.htm

If it can't do what it wants when Windows is running, it will ask to restart and do it's job after reboot.

gnolan

Thanks everyone, got it sorted