[SOLVED] 7.8GB of space locked on USB Thumb Drive

[lukasz]

This might be a good one for you pros.

I have an 8.0GB Corsair Flash Voyager Thumb Drive. I installed Chromium OS on it and after checking it out I formatted it. Well after I formatted it, it now only reads 255MB. I tried to format it but it never changed. The usb is setup as a FAT by default.

I went into Disk Manager on Windows 7 and it shows that I have 2 partitions. One for 255MB and one for 7.8GB but it will not let me free up that space.

I tried loading Knoppix 6.2 thinking I might be able to format it from there but it didn't work so I installed Ubuntu 9.10 and gave it a go, but haven't gotten to far. When I pull up the Disk Utility it shows both partitions and I can format them both but it never reads the 7.8GB or combines it back into 1.

Anyone know why this might be happening?

[MikeTbob]

I think you might need to fdisk the drive, then format it however you want.

[lukasz]

Are we talking about sudo fdisk /dev/nameofdevice? Because when I try that I get the following:

Command (m for help):
I hit m and get a bunch of options. I am not sure which option to select. If I select d for delete partitions it says that a partition isn't defined.

Can you give me anymore help?
Thanks

[bigtomrodney]

I have an 8.0GB Corsair Flash Voyager Thumb Drive. I installed Chromium OS on it and after checking it out I formatted it. Well after I formatted it, it now only reads 255MB. I tried to format it but it never changed. The usb is setup as a FAT by default.

If I was to guess I'd say you wrote a disc image to the drive. This has the side-effect of making a pertition the size of the image. To remedy this it's not enough to reformat that partition (you may call it a drive but it is a parition ), you need to resize it too. Better to be safe, delete the partition altogether and create a new one with the filesystem of your choice. You can use GParted in Linux, fdisk/cfdisk from the command line or diskmgr.msc in Windows to do this.

[lukasz]

bigtomrodney that is a good guess on your part. at this point I wish I never even installed the damn thing on the usb stick

When I try to use Windows Disk Mangement it fails.
http://img718.yfrog.com/img718/779/errorr.jpg

I have tried rebooting and that failed. I have looked at the error and received the following: "Unexpected failure. Error code: 490@01010004".

Couldn't find to much info about that as of yet. I am going to give GParted a try since I haven't had to much success with fdisk or cfdisk but that's probably because I am doing something wrong.

[lukasz]

Update: GParted slapped the usb thumb drive back to the stone age where it realised how it was meant to work.

I know I was looking through forums and read something about GParted but got a little confused by it. Gave it a try and it was all my thumb drive needed.

Thanks for all the help.
Please close this thread.