How to Recover the total capacity of the SD card or thumb drive with Diskpart

With the use of the SD card, or a thumb drive, the storage capacity can begin to decrease over time. This happens when you use these storage devices for more complex tasks than store files. If you use these storage devices to install software, make the device as a Boot drive or running an operating system, as often does one get to run the Linux OS. You will notice that even eliminating all the content, the storage space is not total, is lower due to hidden partitions that are created on the device with data. You will have to do some cleanup specific to that device, in this case I will use the DiskPart which is a tool that comes with Windows Operating System.

To use the DiskPart follow the steps below:
1. Connect the card/thumb drive on your computer;
2. Open the Start menu, type «diskpark» and press ENTER.
3. In the command window that opens, execute «list disk» and you will be presented a list of available disks (including the HDD of your PC);
4. Choose which disk you want to clean (note that the first available disk number is 0).
5. Execute «select disk 2». If your card/drive match this disc or replace the disc number that corresponds to it;
6. Execute «clean» to clean the selected disk;
7. Wait while the disc is completely clean;
8. When finished, execute «create partition primary» to create a partition that will be unique for that device.
9. Execute «format» to format the device.
10. Close the command window, and so you have a completely new device with all sectors and partitions clean.



Note that the card referred as 4GB of storage, will not have the 4GB of space for files. Be especially careful when selecting the drive to clean, because clean the HDD of your PC can clean all your data and programs, damaging its use.