RESTORATION OF SANDISK ULTRA FLASH DRIVES

I used my SanDisk Ultra 3.0 / 256 gb for the purpose of creating a Windows Recovery Drive. I didn’t realize this would make this drive worthless for any other purpose. I only needed 16 GB . The drive was formatted by this process to read only 32 GB and could not be formatted using Windows options. SanDisk customer support advised there was software which could restore the drive to it’s original configuration. http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/19258/ I downloaded the software following the instruction. The pop up in the software under Formatting Options showed quick format and two others which I can’t remember . No Full Formatting option offered. I ran the software with the quick format option checked as it was when I opened the software. It didn’t work. After running it twice , the drive which was 256 GB showed only about half of the drive was free. The other half had no information in it ?? I went back to the software and ran it again. This time I unchecked the quick format option box . This left NO BOXES checked. I ran the software . It is running very slowly . Only about half done . One hour has passed. I don’t know if this will work . I wish the instructions for the software " HP USB Disk Format Tool to format SanDisk USB drives" had better instructions for use. I don’t know if it will be successful or not yet. I hope so. If someone can access a complete set of instructions for the use of this software it would be great. I tried but couldn’t find them.

The HP Format tool is an app made by HP that can be used on any vendor’s flash drive, it is not a SanDisk tool.  It is also not designed to repartition drives, just format partitions, and on Windows systems it is limited to the 1st partition because Windows doesn’t support multiple partitions on removable drives.

I’m not sure how you created your Windows Recovery Drive but sounds like it partitioned your flash drive and you need to repartition it.

I was able to reset the partition size on my 256GB drive by using the diskpart command. This is not something you want to try if you are not very familiar with the Windows command line environment and the Windows file system. Get the wrong volume and you can wipe your computer system! Basically you run diskpart at the CMD prompt, identify the correct volume of the flash drive in question, check the details of the partition (should be 32GB), delete the partition then creat a new partition. With that done you can format the drive by right clicking the flash drive’s letter in Windows Explorer and selecting format.