usb stick only showing 1 gig when it's 4 gig

[DUKENUKEM2UK]

my scandisk usb stick is only showing 1 gig when it's 4 gig. checked the details on the package and bit of paper on it both say 4 gig.

i formatted it to clear old stuff on it now its only showing 900 odd mb space.

any ideas.

[riku]

that's odd, having the stick plugged in, right click "my computer", then "manage". This will open the computer management snap-in, highlight disk management, what shows up in there? You should see "disk 1 removable" or something like that, with the total capacity - is it still 1GB?

[DUKENUKEM2UK]

it shows up as 3 x 950 mb healthy sectors and one 4.75 gb unallocated

[Typhoon Thompson]

Could be that windows is creating partitions for you when formatting. Check what format it is formattng in. FAT is preferred for flash drives.

In disk management just delete all partitions and then allocate the new space a drive letter (very easy to do in Vista).

Could it be a dodgy (pirate) drive?

[Roddie]

Could it be a dodgy (pirate) drive?

That was going to be my question. Seem to be a lot of them on eBay.

[nakamura]

I found my MS pro off the bay was only showing 4 gig when it was 8. In the PSP it showed 8 mind.

[Mayhem]

Could it be the USB controller only handles up to 1GB in size? It applies to some older SD card readers, dunno if that can happen here too...