How To Recover Unallocated Space On A USB Drive

Most of the time, when we perform a clean installation of the windows 10 operating system, we do not see the hard drive partitions on the explorer file.

This can happen if the partitioning was formatted with the wrong file system. Checking the disk partition on the disk management utility will show you the unallocated space.

You can still recover the unallocated space even if you failed to create a partition while you were installing the windows 10 operating system. This can be done quite quickly. 

This same problem can happen to your USB drives as well. You can create partitions on the USB drives just like you can do on the hard drives.

In case if you create a partition on a USB drive and you later find out that you are not able to see the disk partitions, you can fix that by following the steps in this article.

You can fix this problem through 3 methods that will be shown to you in this article. Let us look at these methods.

Using Disk Management Utility

In this method, you will use the disk management utility to solve the problem by recovering the unallocated space on the USB drive. Follow the steps below.

1. Open the windows RUN dialog box. You can do this by pressing on windows key + R
2. In the RUN dialog box, enter ‘diskmgmt.msc’
3. When the disk management utility opens, right-click on the unallocated space behind the USB drive and choose ‘new simple volume’ 
4. Click on ‘next’ when the ‘new simple volume’ wizard opens
5. Specify the volume size that you want and then click on ‘next’
6. Assign a drive letter and then click on ‘next’
7. Format the newly created volume by choosing ‘NTFS’ as the file system and enable the option ‘perform quick format’ and click on ‘next’

And you are done. The unallocated space on the USB drive would be recovered for you. Let us look at the next method.

Using AOMEI Partition Assistant 

There is a lot of third-party software out there you can use if you do not feel like using the method that has been shown above. One of the best among them is AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition.

This tool is free and can be used on the Windows operating systems. Follow the steps below to use the AOMEI partition assistant.

1. Download the AOMEI tool and install it on your computer. After installation, open it
2. You will see the main interface of the tool. Right-click on your USB partition and the choose ‘format partition’ a pop-out window will appear where you will be required to choose either ‘NTFS’ or ‘FAT32’ choose one and click on ’ok’
3. Right-click on the existing partition and choose ‘resize partition’ in the next window that appears, drag the slider to the end of the disk
4. Now, you will be able to see the partition status and you will also be able to undo what you did as well if you want to. If you are ok with everything so far, then you just click on ’apply to effect the changes you just made

And you are done. This is how you can use the AOMEI tool to recover your unallocated disk space. Now let us look at the final method.

EaseUS Partition Master

This is another free third-party tool that can be used to solve the problem of unallocated space. It is one of the best third-party apps out and has received lots of acclaim.

It can be used on both a USB drive and an SD card. Now, let s look at how you can use this tool to fix the problem on a USB drive.

1. Download and install the EaseUS tool on your computer. Now connect your USB device to the computer and open the EaseUS appRight-clickk on your USB partition to erase the data
2. Input the tie you want the partition to be wiped and then click on ‘ok’
3. The pending operation will be shown to you. Just click on ‘execute operation’ to carry on. 
4. Right-click on the unallocated space on your USB and choose ‘create’ to make a partition
5. Now, enter the size of the partition label, the letter, the file system, and then click on ‘ok’
6. Now click on ‘execute operation’ and then click on ‘apply’

And you are done. The operation will be executed and the unallocated space recovered.

Conclusion

So this is how you can recover unallocated space on your USB drive. As you can see, each of the methods listed above is quite easy to follow. You just choose the one you want to use and get underway.