If I right-click on the flash drive in Windows Explorer and select Properties, Windows gives me this information: I did a full format by deselecting the Quick Format option.Īfter reformatting the flash drive, Windows tells me that it is not completely empty.
On my Windows 7 system, I right-clicked on the flash drive in Windows Explorer and selected Format. The flash drive also had some SanDisk SecureAccess software preloaded on it that I did not want. I need to store files that are larger than four GB on this flash drive, so I decided to reformat the flash drive as NTFS. I recently purchased a SanDisk Cruzer CZ36 16GB USB 2.0 flash drive with FAT32 as the default formatting. SuperUser reader Andrew wants to know how there can be used space on an empty and freshly formatted flash drive: