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leblanc

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32G USB stick

I have a 32G usb stick and after reformating it, it says I have only 3G capacity. How do I fix this? Thanks
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arnold
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What did you format it with? Fat16, fat32
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leblanc

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fat32 (default
That is strange, what are you using to format? What system are you on?
List the partitions to make sure you did not split/limit the size .............
Make of USB stick?
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rindi
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he only formatted the stick, rindi
i don't beleive he wants to install windows from it
He doesn't need to install Windows with it. The tool includes further utilities, at least one of them is a very formatting tool for USB sticks and SD memory cards.
well - i have no evidence of such tool being better for the task than windows ; but maybe you have some?
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I have a 64 GB USB stick that started to give issues and I put it aside.

I just attached it to my Windows 7 machine, right clicked and said Format.  It says:

60 GB (correct)
exFAT (default)
Allocation unit 128 Kb

I just unchecked Quick Format and will see what happens

Did you try exFAT ?
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My stick worked fine with 32G before. Then I want to make it a bootable usb with kali linux iso. So I used rufus. After rufus did its thing, it said to reformat the usb, which I think is  akind of weird. But I did not do it. So I tried to open the usb under win exploere and it said i needed to format the USB. That is where I see it is only 3G capacity. I do no think this usb is a fake because I have been using this usb stick for a while now. I have never had any issue until now.

It is an Extreme Sandisk 32G BTW
I haven't used rufus, but it probably creates a partition of the size it needs for the OS you want on it. Windows can only handle one partition on a USB stick. So you don't see the rest of it. That is also one of the advantages of using WinSetupFromUSB to create your bootable stick. It can use the total size of the stick, as it creates a boot menu, and then accesses the iso file of the OS you want to boot from directly, while other tools extract the content from those files. Further advantages are that you can have more than one iso to boot from, including Linux, not just Windows which the tool's name would imply.
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you don't have to believe - test the stick with the tools i provided; that's all
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Ok. I look in diskmgmt.msc and this is what I got (see below). It is there and it is unallocated. How do I get my 32G back?

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As I said, either use the format option in WinsetupFromESB I mentioned earlier (that is the best way in my point of view, as it properly formats it), or try using Windows Diskmanagement, delete any partition on the stick, then create a new one and format that.
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I right click on the unallocated to try to delete but I don't have the delete option.
The un-allocated space already has nothing on it. You have to do that with the space that is allocated.
Try what rindi recommends or try formatting it again on a Windows machine.

It is not a volume in the sense of a hard drive so Delete is not active.
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