flash drive reporting wrong size, how to fix?

[Ian Malone]

On 15 January 2012 00:47, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2012-01-14 at 22:52 +0000, Ian Malone wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've got a 2GB microSD card that I've been using a while (so I'm
>> confident that at one point it was a 2GB card and isn't a 'fake').
>> Recently it stopped responding (the last place it was used was in my
>> phone) and on plugging it into my computer (I've got two separate
>> adaptors, one a USB-microSD, the other a microSD-SD and have tried it
>> in two machines) it now shows up as having no partitions and an
>> unpartitioned capacity of ~48MB. I suspect it's failed somehow and
>> they're not expensive to replace, but I'd be interested to know if
>> there are any tools that I could use to try and re-program it to show
>> the correct size again. Any suggestions?
>
> Use fdisk to check the partition table. The drive should have at least
> one partition.
>
> Use mkfs to make a filesystem.
>
> If you want device portability, you should probably create a VFAT
> partition and use the VFAT option to mkfs.
>
> However I have had cases where this doesn't work well, especially with a
> USB flash drive -- not a microSD -- that's been used a lot. I've had to
> format the drive on a Windows machine, which (so far) has always
> recovered it.
>

Well, wasn't not really a case of the filesystem or partitioning (past
tense will become clear). Earlier in the week fdisk was reporting 48MB
for the disk size. I tried gparted + gpart on it yesterday just before
sending my email (the repair partition option in gparted) and that
didn't seem to make any difference, gparted still showed 48MB.
Attempted to create a partition too (48MB in size) which didn't seem
to do anything. However plugging it in again, fdisk is now showing
this:

Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1938021 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x5476743a

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1              63  1953522143   976761040+   7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

Which is not the 2GB it used to be (and I'm pretty sure I used it to
capacity in the past). Going to try formatting through Windows to see
if that makes any difference, though I did try the Windows disk
management earlier in the week too, can't remember what it showed,
think it was 0 space on the device, but it might have been the 48MB.

-- 
imalone