Pen drive showing less capacity after formatting !!! – solved

Most of us are having at least one Pen drive for data storage and transfer. These drives otherwise called as ( jump drives, thumb drives, pen drives, or USB key chain drives) are using flash technology which can  get damaged easily if not used carefully. 

There is a chance that the Pen drive showing less capacity after formatting or any unexpected situations like

•  removing the pen-drive while writing into it
•  installing some bootable OS like chromium in it.
•  interruption before the Formatting procedure completes.
•  virus attack.

There is an easy way to try before throwing it away.Say if the pen drive capacity is 8gb it may only show 1gb or less after such situations. There is an easy solution for this

1. Open Disk Management in Windows- [Right click on my computer-manage-Disk Management].
2. Check whether the Pen drive is detected and showing the correct capacity [it will, on most cases].
3. If the volume is shown as an ‘unallocated space‘ then probably the file system in the drive is not detected by the OS, hence we should make it as something called as “RAW” format. Try to make a NEW Simple Volume by Right clicking on the unallocated space and select New Simple Volume. 

If the new simple volume option is not available, we will find another way out, cleaning the configuration of the drive.

• Open Command Prompt [Win-key+R and type cmd].
• Execute “diskpart“[type "diskpart" and hit enter] & Disk-partition tool as command line gets executed.
• List the volumes in your computer[type "list volume" and execute].
• Select the volume representing your pen drive [type "select volume 5" if your volume is 5] . You can see as volume 5 is selected.

Note:-you should confirm the volume before proceeding because we will clean the file system of this volume in next step.

• Clean the configuration of the volume[type "clean" and execute].
• Now exit from command prompt. Now you will be able to create a New Simple Volume in Disk-Management as in Step 3 and follow the procedure .[do not format the drive in the last step because we will do it later]
• Now remove the pen drive and insert that into a different USB port and format it as your wish.[I recommend NTFS format if for 4gb and more capacity than FAT32]

Enjoy.
Next time if your friend’s Pen drive showing less capacity then, without any software you can solve it for sure.