Just noticed that the 8gb Sandisk USB flash I purchased from Play a few months ago only shows 5.3gb
Could this be a counterfeit flash drive.

Where are you viewing the data? Have you tried Disk Management?

Does it show 5.3% as Total or just Free?

There is always a Windows discrepancy due to binary calculations as opposed to base 10. This generally is along the lines of 7% so a 8GB drive would read about 7.4GB

I've been assuming that the whole of the drive was formatted as one partition when I formatted under Windows Explorer.
Under Disk Management I find that I have a partition of 5.32gb, and an unformatted area of 2.21gb. I can't delete the 5.32gb partition, nor format the 2.21gb space.
Tried Disk Management and Explorer under both XP and Vista. Also tried Partition Magic under XP, but it does not see flash drive.
Any other formatting programs which will allow a complete re-format.

GParted should but as it works from boot outside of Windows your motherboard would have to support USB on boot.

GParted -- Live CD/USB/PXE/HD

When I ran Windows in a galaxy far far away, I used this as a tool to format USB.

HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool | Peripherals Download | PC World

FYI...Some USB Thumb drives have a "Security" partition that you can lock down. What model of Sandisk did you get?

For example: If you got the Cruzer model that came with U3 technology then you can download a utility from Sandisk and remove it...Here's a link how...
http://blog.kgrothoff.net/2006/08/24...b-flash-drive/

Thanks for the replies.
I tried the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool, and that did the trick.
Rannoch

Glad it worked out for you. Thanks for the followup.