If typing commands into a black window is not your thing, Windows has the same surgery built into a graphical tool. Disk Management draws the drive's pieces as bars — delete the pieces, and one fresh volume takes the whole bar.
Plenty of people freeze at the words 'open Command Prompt as administrator' — and they never need to. The shrunk-drive problem is a partition problem, and Windows ships a partition editor with pictures. This page does the entire restore with a mouse: find the right row, delete the leftover pieces, and let the wizard build one partition across the whole drive. The one situation where the graphical tool honestly gives up is covered at the end.
Press Windows + X and choose Disk Management. The bottom half lists one row per physical disk. Yours is the row labelled Removable with a total near 57 GB. Everything you do happens inside that single row — the rows above it are your internal disks, and they are not part of this job. Rescue the drive's files before going further; the next step deletes them.
Right-click the first coloured volume on the pen drive's row and choose Delete Volume. Confirm the warning — yes, it erases that partition's data, which is why your files are already copied. Repeat for every partition on the row: the 14 GB volume, the small EFI piece, any anonymous blocks. Each deleted piece turns black and merges into the unallocated bar. You are done deleting when the row is one single black bar running the full width of the disk.
Right-click the black bar and choose New Simple Volume. The wizard asks four things:
Seconds later Explorer shows one drive at full capacity. No command line was harmed in this process.
Sometimes a partition refuses: Delete Volume is greyed, or an EFI/protected piece will not delete from this window at all. That is a real limitation of the graphical tool, not something you did wrong, and it is the one situation where this route honestly ends. Do not reach for random partition downloads first — the built-in answer is DiskPart's clean, which removes every partition on the disk in a single command. The DiskPart page in this set walks it with the safety checks that command deserves.
Watch the video for both routes side by side, then pick the one your hands are comfortable with.
▶️ Watch Full VideoA leftover partition on that row was not deleted, so the wizard can only use the unallocated piece next to it. Cancel, look along the row for any remaining coloured volume, delete it too, and start the wizard again when the bar is one full black strip.
It is stronger. Formatting wipes the inside of one partition; deleting removes the partition itself from the map. Merging a shrunken drive needs the stronger action — that is why a hundred formats never restored the space.
No. If the drive never appears as a disk row, the problem is detection — a port, cable, or a drive the system cannot initialise — which is a different fault family. This page starts where the drive is visible but wrongly divided.