How to recover the lost space on USB drive?

You may have the similar experience that you suddenly found your 16 GB flash drive showing up as 3 GB or less. While you even have not save files on it. What happened and where does the lost space go? Of course you can fix the this problem. Before you try to fix it, you should back up or restore all your data on this drive.

How to find the lost space?

Your USB drive lost space generally for the space become inaccessible or unallocated. Open the Disk-management, you will find the uncallocated space.

Why this problem occurs?

If you burn a system to the drive, the system may change the partition system so that it leaves some space on your drive. An improper formatting will also cause inaccessible space on the drive. So you need to reallocate these spaces. You can allocate these spaces with Windows Diskpart utility.

How to bring the lost space back?

Connect your USB drive with computer, and find the unallocated space in Disk management, remember the size.

Type diskpart in the Run dailog, click to open it.

Type list disk and press Enter. It will list all the disk on your computer. You can distinguish the free space according to the listed size.

Type “ select disk 3”. The disk number is the number of the unallocated space.

Type “clean” to delete all on your selected disk.

Type “create partition primary” and press enter. It will create a primary partition. After that you can format unallocated space on your drive. This process will delete all your data on the drive, so you should have backed up all your data.

How to recover data from the USB drive?

To recover data from your USB drive, you need to make sure the USB drive still can be recognized. If the drive has dead or the data on the drive have been overwritten, you may have no way to retrieve them.

Connect your USB drive to computer. If it shows up in the Computer or the Disk management, you can start to recover all your data.

Download and run the data recovery software to scan your drive. The scanning will take you some time, depending on the size of your files.

After scanning, you are able to view all the lost files. Preview and find the files you need. Check them.

Choose the recovery path for your data. The data to be recovered should be save on the location where have no data loss.

Finally, check the files that have been recovered. Although you have successfully restored your files, you should back up them in case the future data loss.