Temporary thread drift:

Several web sites (even including some that normally give good advice) have mentioned a problem with "reduced capacity" on flash drives that my be the cause of the "defective drives" comments made here.

It appears that there are two separate causes that may be fairly common, with one being a "write protected" attribute being applied to some or all of the files on a drive, or to the entire drive.

The other possibility is that reformatting with changes in the format used (as when moving back and forth between Windows, Unix, and Mac) can result in partitioning of the memory with some partitions being "invisible" except in the OS that makes them, so that only "the rest of it" can be formatted by another OS.

While most of the "suggestions" to fix the problem don't work - typical for the "social network help" that Microsoft thinks is sufficient since they (temporarily?) took down their Knowledge Base to try to get rid of Win98(?) - a few places say that "free download special programs" have solved their problem, or that flash drives with "lost space" can sometimes be reformatted, to recover all of the drive, using Windows' Drive Management Tools (in Control Panel) instead of just the Right-Click|Select Format that usually should suffice.

Several "free programs" are suggested, at least some of which are reported to have worked, but I can't vet any of the sources, so I'll leave it up to anyone who wants to work this problem to see what's available in that kind of help.

Note that this doesn't appear to relate to the problem under discussion, but I was a little puzzled that people have had significant trouble with lost capacity on flash drives. I don't use flash drives enough to have seen the problem, but it does seem to bother a fair number of those who do.

John