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Welcome back to another week of Lifehacker’s Technical Advice Column. Tech 911. And thanks to everyone who sent in their questions from last week’s prompt. If you didn’t get it don’t worry, you can still send in your geeky questions anytime you want. I will always have answers.
This week we’re talking about storage. Specifically, what to do if the (somewhat expensive) flash drive you bought doesn’t give you the full space you need. As the Lifehacker reader “SK” writes:
My question is how to format a 64GB flash drive so that both a PC and a Mac can use it. If you do exfat it will only format 32GB. What do you do with the rest Help please?
Unknown partitions can significantly reduce your free space
I have a couple of ideas as to why this might happen, but first I wanted to say that you are doing the right thing by trying to format your flash drive as exFAT. Windows will not allow you to format a flash drive larger than 32GB as FAT32 because Windows. But that doesn’t mean you can’t. If you are using a third-party tool such as EaseUS Partition MasterThis allows you to format your flash drive as a 64TB FAT32 file system.
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As always, this is only useful if you want that good Windows / Mac compatibility and don’t plan to put individual files larger than 4 GB on your flash drive – FAT32’s Achilles heel.
(If all of this sounds like hocus-pocus to you, don’t worry. Storage devices can be formatted with different file systems, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. This is usually something you don’t have to worry about when you save the first time when you format something, and in general, it’s an issue that is more likely to affect you when trying to use a dual platform storage device.For example, if you live in a Windows world, just format your flash drive as NTFS and done.)
However, there’s no reason exFAT shouldn’t work, and I would generally stick with it when switching between Mac and Windows. You never know when you might be going against that FAT32 limit, and it’s better to have that compatibility upfront than waste time copying files from your drive, reformatting them to exFAT, and copying them all back.
I believe that formatting your drive as exFAT will cut it in half in size. In my opinion, this is not a problem inherent in exFAT. I actually have a 64GB flash drive right in front of me, just plugged it in and tried reformatting it as exFAT using the normal Windows tool.
Screenshot: David Murphy
We didn’t encounter any issues with these settings, so I suspect something else might be happening to your flash drive.
Screenshot: David Murphy
Make sure you don’t accidentally use multiple partitions on your flash drive. This can result in the inability to access the space that you can access after formatting your flash drive. To do this, click the Windows 10 Start button and enter “Computer Management.” Start this app and then click on “Disk Management” under the heading “Storage” in the left sidebar. You should see a screen that looks like this:
Screenshot: David Murphy
Find your removable storage drive in the list of storage devices below and make sure it has a single partition – like in the image above for the “G:” drive – rather than two. If the latter is the case, then right click on it “Delete volume” Then right-click on the large piece of space and select it “New Simple Volume.” As part of the process, you will be asked to format the volume with a specific file system. Choose exFATand you should be fine.
I would do the process even if you were staring at a single volume. However, I can’t imagine why a 64GB drive only shows a 32GB volume and nothing else, not even some of the unallocated space. This is where we start to “throw any solution onto the problem,” I think.
I can also use a third party tool to do this (like the one above) EaseUS Partition Master) to do your formatting instead of Windows. A problem with the operating system may be causing your memory chaos, and a third-party app can overcome that. Still, I think the very root of your problem is an extra partition that you just don’t notice. Fix that and you should have a full 64GB of space that you can format as exFAT with no problem.
Do you have a technical question that keeps you up at night? Tired of troubleshooting your Windows or Mac? Are you looking for advice on apps, browser extensions, or utilities to accomplish a specific task? Let us know! Let us know in the comments below or by email david.murphy@lifehacker.com.