Reduce the amount of stick: Causes and Solutions

Sometimes there are situations when the flash drive suddenly shrinks. The most common reasons for this situation may be incorrect removal from the computer, incorrect formatting, poor-quality drive and viruses. In any case, it is necessary to understand how to solve this problem.

Reduce the amount of stick: Causes and Solutions

Depending on the cause, you can use several solutions. We will look at all of them in detail.

Method 1: Virus Check

There are viruses that make files on a flash drive hidden, and can not see them. It turns out that the flash drive seems to be empty, and there is no place to. Therefore, if there is a problem with the placement of data on a USB-stick, you need to check it for viruses. If you do not know how to check, please visit our instructions.

Lesson: Check and completely clean the flash drive from viruses

Method 2: Special utility

Often, Chinese manufacturers are selling through online stores cheap drives. They can be with a hidden drawback: the actual capacity they differ materially. They can be 16 GB and 8 GB only work.

Often, buying a flash drive large capacity at a low price, the owner there are problems with inadequate performance of such a device. This shows clear evidence of the fact that the actual volume of USB-drive different from the one that appears in the device properties.

To remedy the situation, you can use a special program AxoFlashTest. It will restore the correct size of the drive.

Download free AxoFlashTest

1. Copy your files to another drive and format the USB flash drive.
2. Download and install the program.
3. Run it with administrator privileges.
4. Open the main window in which to select your drive. To do this, right click on the image with a magnifying glass folder. Then click "Test error".

   

   Upon completion of the testing program will give the actual size of the stick and the necessary information for its recovery.

5. Now click on the "Test speed" and wait for the result of the check speed stick. The resulting report will contain the read and write speed, and speed class, in accordance with the SD specification.
6. If the flash drive does not meet the specs, then after the report AxoFlashTest program offers to restore the real volume of the stick.

And although the size will be smaller, you can not worry about your data.

Some of the major manufacturers of flash drives provide for their flash drives free utilities to recover the volume. For example, Transcend company has a free utility Transcend Autoformat.

Official site transcend.

This program allows you to determine the scope and return its correct value. It is easy to use. If you have a TRANSCEND flash drive, then do this:

1. Run the TRANSCEND AutoFormat utility.



2. In the "Disk Drive" field, select your medium.
3. Select the type of drive - "SD", "MMC" or "CF" (written on the housing).
4. Check the "Complete Format" item and click the "Format" button.

Method 3: Check for broken sectors

If there are no viruses, then you need to check the storage storage sectors. You can check using standard Windows tools. To do this, follow these actions:

1. Go to "This computer".
2. Right-click on the display of your flash drive.
3. In the pop-up menu, select the item "Properties".



4. In a new window, enter the "Service" tab.
5. In the upper section "Disk Check", click "Check".



6. A window will appear with the check parameters, mark both parameters and click "Run".



7. At the end of the verification, a report will appear on the presence or absence of errors on removable media.

See also: Instructions for updating BIOS C flash drive

Method 4: Eliminate a virtual malfunction

Most often, a decrease in the size of the drive is associated with a malfunction at which the device is broken down into 2 areas: the first one is marked and visible, the second is not marked.

Before performing all the actions described below, be sure to copy the desired data from the flash drive to another disk.

In this case, you need to combine and make marking anew. You can perform it using Windows. For this:

1. Enter B.

   "Control Panel" -> "System and Security" -> "Administration" -> "Computer Management"

2. On the left side of the tree, open the "Disk Management" item.

   

   It can be seen that the flash drive is divided into 2 areas.

3. Right-click on the unimpressed section, in the menu that appears it is noticeable that you cannot do anything with such a partition, since the "Make a section active" buttons and "Expand Tom" are not available.

   

   Correct this problem using the DiskPart command. For this:

   • Press the "Win + R" key combination;
   • Dial the CMD command and click "Enter";
   • In the console appeared, type the DiskPart command and press "ENTER" again;
   • The Microsoft DiskPart utility opens to work with disks;

   

   • Enter List Disk and click "Enter";
   • A list of discs connected to the computer will appear, look at what number is your flash drive and enter the SELECT Disk = N command, where n is the number of the flash drive in the list, press "ENTER";
   • Enter the Clean command, click "Enter" (this command will clean the disc);

   

   • Create a new section of the Create Partition Primary command;
   • Exit the command line on the EXIT command.
   • Return to the standard "Disk Manager" and click "Update", click on the unintended location of the right mouse button and select "Create a simple volume ...";

   

   • Format the USB flash drive in the standard way from the "My Computer" section.

   Flash drive size is restored.

As you can see, solve the problem with a decrease in the volume of the flash drive simply, if you know its cause. Good luck in work!

See also: Manual in case the computer does not see a flash drive