My Xgb pen drive was reduced to Ygb

Created by Jeff B
Keywords:
reformat repartition shrunk
Last updated by:
Tobin Davis

After using WinImageWriter, the capacity of your device has apparently been shrunk to match the size of the image that was burned. Even a reformat of the device does not restore the extra space.

This seems to be a common (and frustrating for the end-user) experience. Various options are presented here:
https://answers.launchpad.net/win32-image-writer/+question/74814 and
https://answers.launchpad.net/win32-image-writer/+question/240799

Read the proposed solutions and see if any of them work for you. They're essentially different methods of repartioning the USB device - some apparently work better with different devices than others, which is why I can't propose a "one size fits all" answer. Also, there are utilities to resize the filesystem on the device.

The basic issue here is that win32ImageWriter does a bit copy of the img file selected, starting with the first sector. This will overwrite the existing partition table, thus making the "Logical" volumes appear smaller than the physical device. This functionality is similar to a system hard drive with multiple partitions (i.e. factory restore partition). The problem is the partition format for SD cards is slightly different than normal drives.

For this reason, it is highly recommended that you select an empty img file and select read to back up your drive before overwriting it with a new image.