OK, well, I decided to upgrade my system to Win 10, went to MS's website, and was given the choice of either burning a DVD or setting it up on a jump drive. In a moment of brain fade, I elected to have it set up the jump drive, only too late realizing it would probably reformat my drive. I had quite a bit of data on the drive, but fortunately none of it was irreplaceable. Only after this did I elect to burn a DVD instead.

But the damage had been done. My 256 GB jump drive had been reformatted to 32 GB. Yep, MS, resized and reformatted the drive's partition. I tried doing a reformat of the jump drive, but it just kept the resized partition. No surprise there, but hey, it was worth a shot.

So my question to those of you who are a lot more geeky or nerdy about this topic than me, is there a relatively painless way I can reclaim my jump drive's lost gigabytes? I tried typing the "format" command into the command prompt, took a look at the various switches, but none of them seemed to do what I wanted.

I have -- around here somewhere, but I don't know where, and I've looked -- a Linux set of utilities that I burned to CD some years back that is a really useful collection. I don't recall the name of this collection of utilities offhand. It uses a slick graphical interface and has such things as disk cloning and partition setting and resizing, plus a good deal more. I've used this utility quite a bit, both for disk cloning and partition setting and resizing. But it's not gonna do me any good unless I can find it. So I'm hopeful I can at least restore my jump drive without it.

But if you're familiar with this set of Linux utilities I'm describing, and you know the name of them, I'd appreciate it if you could pass that name along. It would be a whole lot easier at this point for me just to burn another CD.

I don't use Linux so I'm not familiar with Linux tools. However, a free and dead easy Windows tool to use is +++ Lazesoft Recovery Tool +++. It's free.

What you're wanting to do is remove the drive partition Microsoft installed.

Thanks for the response, Jim. I'll take a look at your link. I did a bit of googling after posting the above message, and found the name of the Linux utility. It's called GParted. A bit more reading reveals that it can clone drives, but that it appears set up primarily to clone Linux partitions. So the clone software I used must have been another Linux utility. That seems to jog my memory correctly (the last time I cloned a disk was probably five years ago).

Actually, I don't really need to remove the partition that MS installed, I just need to stretch it out so that it fills all available space on the jump drive. Which is something that's easy to do with GParted.

I went ahead and dl'd the latest version of GParted, just so I have a copy, and I'll continue to search for that Linux utility that I used to clone drives.

Cloning drives is very useful. Say I want to upgrade the hard drive in my computer to one that is a lot bigger. But I don't want to have to reinstall everything. Well, I can clone the old drive's contents onto the new drive, but what happens is, an exact copy is made, all the way down to the old partition size. That's where GParted comes in. I can take my freshly cloned drive, and using GParted, either stretch the new partition so that it occupies all drive space, or I can create additional partitions to occupy the additional drive space. I frequently do both -- I'll enlarge the existing partition and create one or two additional partitions for the remaining space.

I'm just about at that point on my laptop where I need to get a new, larger hard drive, the main one. It's 1 TB and has only about 100 GB of room left. So time for a 2 TB drive, I'm figuring. When I do the install, I'll have to use both a clone utility and GParted to complete things.

Oh, and by the way, I'm not really a Linux user either, although I have played around with it some. The cool thing about these utilities is you burn them to bootable CDs. They install a basic Linux kernel into system RAM only, from which they performs all their actions.

Why not put an SSD in it and use an external for storage?

Bob

Several solutions here:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/128gb-flash-drive-now-reads-32gb-in-windows-10/9e005b91-cd11-47b1-99ea-a024bfc56496

You should be able to delete the partition and/or extend the volume (providing it doesn't have the O/S on it), using Disk Management tools in Windows.

First: Some reading material

Then format the partition.

This might get you back the disk space you require.

Bob, I've been waiting for the price of SSDs to drop before I make a move with them. It's on the "to do" list, just haven't done it yet. But this doesn't have anything to do with reclaiming the lost gigs on my USB jump drive.

VideoTrack, the Disk Management tool stuff you refer to is for Win 10. I'm still running Win 7, and couldn't figure out how to get it to "extend" the partition. I did all the reading up and more, still couldn't get it done.

John, you hit on it. That link on how to use the "diskpart" command was the key. I got my GBs back! Yay!

Michael, great that you got it going.
From your opening sentence I understood that you had upgraded to Windows 10. I didn't see a mention of Windows 7 anywhere.

Sorry for the misunderstanding. All I've done so far is burn the DVD. Still haven't installed Win10 yet.