I have a 4 Gb USB drive that I had to reformat using fat32. I lost about 1/2 pf its capacity. How do I recover the original size?

Bob Owen

   I think the upper limit of FAT32 is 20gb, so FAT32 is not the problem.
   Could it be that you are using an old DOS or fdisk?  Older DOS and fdisk, like that which comes with Win95 and earlier versions of Win98, have limits.

I amusing XP Pro. Thanks anyway.

Are you formatting from within WinXP using the disk management tool...or what method?
Have you run chkdsk on the drive?
Does Windows Explorer show anything on the drive or does it just show it as a blank 2 GB drive?

I am using the standard XP formatting tool. Windows Explorer shows a blank drive, Chkddsk shows 2,054,651,904 bytes available on the disk. I believe a special formatting may have been used originally. The drive has no manufacturer label nor does my receipt from GearXS.

Check this article. It seems formatting devices like this is somewhat tricky.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/898456/en-us

Hope this helps you out.