USB memory stick thinks it's a different size

[turbofiat124]

I've got two SanDisk cruisers. One is 4 GB and the other one is 32 GB. The weird thing is both of these thumb drives shows up as being 16 GB.

I could see how the 32 GB might think it's a 16 GB (if it's damaged or a partition is messed up) but the 4 GB?

This all started after experimenting with CloudReady. Not knocking it but the installation program partitions a USB drive and uses an image file to create a bootable USB stick. The website says SanDisks are not reliable for this application. I'm not sure why.

Initially what confused me was my XP machine showed each of these drives as being 1.10 GB. When I tried to transfer some files to each of these thumbdrives, I ran out of space.

For whatever reason, XP will not show a partitioned USB drive under "My Computer". Any partitions added are invisible in XP.

If I plug each of these USB drives into my Windows 8 machine, it shows two partitions (E: 1.10 GB and F: the initial capacity - 1.10 GB).

So I went into DISKPART and deleted the second partition off each thumb drive then reformatted each drive as FAT32. Now both of them are showing 16 GB. But only one drive is now showing up in Windows 8 (E.

I deleted "Disk 2". So are there actually 2 partitions and I just deleted one of them?

One thing I have not had a chance to do yet is use the CLEAN function. My understanding is if a USB stick is corrupted, this will return it to factory.

One more thing. I've read about people getting scammed buying fake hard drives or USB flash drives with fake capacities. How is this even possible?

Is this an urban legend?

In one version I read someone purchased a 1 TB hard drive off Ebay from a guy in Russia. He noticed that after loading it with files, some were missing. He opened it up and instead of finding an actual hard drive, he found a lower capacity thumb drive and a rock to make it seem heavier. Apparently the thumb drive can be altered so that if it fills up, instead of getting an error saying the thumb drive has reached it capacity, it's set up in an endless loop. Kind of like an 8 track tape if anybody remembers those.

Here's a video I found on fake Sony USB sticks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xJfC3jCPXM

 

[Dugimodo]

Windows does not deal well with partitioned flash drives and the built in tools don't work well for fixing them. I've used Linux in the past to restore flash drives to a single NTFS or FAT32 partition so windows could deal with them after an unusual format has made them play up. There may be windows utilities you can use but I'm not familiar with any myself. You want to delete all partitions and create a new single one for 100% of the capacity.

 

[jpe1701]

I got a fake usb drive on eBay once. I can't remember how I fixed it but it was a 4gb drive that was altered to read as 32gb and it would act as if everything saved but when you went looking it wasn't there.I used it as a 4gb drive after I fixed it.

 

[turbofiat124]

I thought I'd post my solution. After digging on the internet I found a free program called AOMEI partition assistant version 6.6:

https://www.disk-partition.com/free-partition-manager.html

This allowed me to see how the USB stick was partition and what was going on with it. I was able to delete any unusual partitions and reformat both USB sticks back to factory specs.

I did not have any luck using the "CLEAN" function under DISKPART. This seemed to make the USB drive worse and totally unusable. Luckily the program above was able to fix it.