Thursday, December 3, 2015

pen drive not showing full space

fter writing the FreeNAS IMG to a 16 GB USB flash drive, I can now only use 938 MB. I used the Win32 Disk Imager tool to write the IMG to the device. Then later, when I inserted the the USB drive into my Windows 7 computer it said that it had to be formatted, because it couldn't read it. I believe this is normal. So I formatted it inside Windows using the format option when prompted. So in Windows Explorer now, 938 MB is reported as capacity of this device.
a
Also, when i check the properties dialog box I can see the same numbers.
b
And when I check with diskmgmt.msc I can see there are several volumes I don't recognize and unallocated space of 12.79 GB.
c
Now, I have another 2 GB USB flash drive with the same problem. It too was used for FreeNAS, and it too has a reported capacity of only 938 MB. I thought it was broken there for a while, until I saw the same problem with this 16 GB model.
I tried using diskpart on the 2 GB model, and I saw that there were several partitions there (list partitions) just like on this one. So I used the clean option to try to wipe it, but that wiped off everything so it's totally useless now. I'm not sure how to rebuild it.
Is this a standard routine, like part of the whole "user experience", that whenever you make a bootable USB falsh drive with FreeNAS, it messes up your device? I am new to FreeNAS, so i wouldn't know. But it sure looks like it. Maybe it is in fact the format operation in Windows that messes things up... I don't know. It's not very nice.