Empty Pen drive showing 150MB used.

[Dr.Thug]

Hello everyone,
I joined this forum few minutes ago.
I got a free LG pen drive 254mb along with my laptop around less than a year back.it was working fine when i last used it 3-4 months back.but last night,when i plued in,it showed empty(i dont store any data in the pen drive) but i couldn't transfer a 100mb file into it.when i checked properties,it showed 158mb used and 95.9 mb free.How do i recover the space?
i read throught the syicky thread but didn't help me as i am using a Win XP.

Any help appreciated.
Thank you.

 

[Sean]

Right click the drive and format it, hmm im guessing to FAT.

 

[Tedster]

read sticky!

https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic45947.html

 

[Dr.Thug]

Thank You.

Thanks Sean

@Tedster,i had read that thread but i didnt know what formatting was and how to do it.

 

[Tedster]

formatting prepares a storage device so a computer and operating system can use it.

Basically there are two types:

low level - the computer prepares the device so it knows it is there and is free of errors

high level - the operating system writes a boot sector and directory information so it knows where to put data and files.

a flash drive is essentially a ram drive - a device that uses static ram to emulate a "mini hard disk".

now do you understand?
the sticky tells you how to do it.
FAT32 and NTFS are two different types of low level formatting. FAT32 is older techology and stores less data per sector and is typically found on small storage devices.

 

[CrossFire851]

That's why NTFS is good on anything over 32Gigs.