Pen Drive capacity has decreased by 480MB

[slimTech]

Hi
I have got a 2GB My Flash pen drive from A-Data. It came bundled with usb utility that helped create partition as public and secured (one for both). At this time the capacity was 1.88GB. I created a secured parition of 250MB and rest for public. It worked well for two or three months until I got both the partitions removed away. To access the device, I had to format and it only showed the capacity that was for public partition before i.e. 1.65GB (I tried of course with windows formatter as well as with device utility software). No matter, it was ok with that. But few days back once again the capacity has been decreased to 1.41GB and it often gives error while carrying data.
I have also tried with paritition magic 8.0 but pm8.0 didn't support it.

Any suggestion is welcome.
SlimTech

[NucleusKore]

Boot system from Gparted live cd with pendrive plugged in and delete all partitions
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

[nvidia]

Format the entire drive completely(Not quick format) and then try.
And stay away from Partition Magic.. It can make things worse..

[NucleusKore]

Originally Posted by nvidia

..... and then try.
And stay away from Partition Magic.. It can make things worse..

It is also jokingly known as Partition Tragic.

[dheeraj_kumar]

Partition Tragic

Lol! didnt know that!

Anyway, you can try a low level format, that can fix ANY logical issue on the drive.

[nvidia]

Originally Posted by NucleusKore

It is also jokingly known as Partition Tragic.

Lol.. Thats so true... My had disk was totally messed up after using it..

[ashutosh.sanny]

boot from cd , with pendrive plug in , deleat all partition and recreat it

[slimTech]

thanks to u all

as told by NucleusKore, I couldn't get the Gparted live cd. Only I was able to downloaded a file gparted-0.3.7.tar.bz2 from http://gparted.sourceforge.net/ that contained c++ source files. Please suggest.

I tried with the bootable cd, but it only displayed the partition that was available in the pendrive. I want to recover the disk space that i have lost.
as told by dheeraj_kumar, the low level format might work but i don't know how to do it.
Please suggest way to do low level format.

[pimpom]

Originally Posted by nvidia

Format the entire drive completely(Not quick format) and then try.
And stay away from Partition Magic.. It can make things worse..

I've heard of some people having problems after using Partition Magic, but to present a balanced view -

I've been using PM8 for years now to partition, format, resize, change file system, change cluster size, hide or unhide partitions, etc., etc. of hundreds of hard disks. Not once have I ever had any problem with it. It's a versatile tool and careless or inexpert use can certainly cause problems, but judging from my own experience, I don't think it's a crappy piece of software.