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.