Have problems with both my usb sticks the first one is 1Gb DSE however only around 90mb are free, in properties it states that 910mb are used even though no other files can be seen. There are no hidden files, or trashes. The 2nd is a 4gb My flash USB, problem here is that usually computers do not recognize it, but when they do no files can be seem and the properties state that its full. Any ideas??

The drive manufacturer's size is probably stated as a decimal size - at least, it always is with hard drives - your mboard bios and Windows see it's size as binary size - same total number of bytes and sectors, but it's smaller as seen as a binary size. decimal 1,000,000,000 bytes/gb binary 1,073,741,824 bytes/gb decimal 1gb = binary 931.32...mb decimal 4gb = binary 3.7263...gb The manufacturer's stated size is the capacity before it has been partitioned and formatted as well - you always lose some capacity when you partition and format. ..... Ram, on the other hand, is always the binary size. e.g. 1gb manufacturer's size = 1024mb = 1048576kb = 1,073,741,824 bytes ..... If these drives are not as they should be otherwise... You may need to plug them into a different USB port, or you may have another USB related problem See response 3 in this: http://www.computing.net/answers/wi... Did you click on the Safely Remove icon (green arrow) in your taskbar and stop accessing these drives every time you removed these when Windows was running? If you didn't, you probably damaged the data on the drives yourself. You can reformat them so that they are normal again, but you will probably not be able to get any data off of them that you want to save if you can't do that at present.