Why has my 32 GB bootable USB stick shrunk to 3.88 MB

Question

I wanted to install Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS and created a bootable USB stick using balenaEtcher. I used a 32 GB SanDisk USB stick for this. After doing this I found that the size was reduced to 3.88 MB and the contents of the USB drive was just a folder named efi, which in turn had a folder named 'boot' with the following files: bootx64.efi, grubx64.efi, mmx64.efi.

I found out that the USB drive had been partitioned and there is 28.38 GB of unallocated space. Can you please let me know if I can use this USB stick to boot into Ubuntu?

You probably wrote the ISO as bootable (and installable) media and haven't yet installed it. If you wrote the ISO to thumb-drive, you boot the thumb-drive & install from it. — guiverc, Dec 22 '22 at 23:04
Does this answer your question? What is the proper way of creating installation media from Ubuntu iso? — karel, Dec 23 '22 at 13:10

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 22 '22 at 23:17

That happens after burning an OS to your USB drive, after you are finished using it for that purpose, you can reformat it so it goes back to its original state. If by any reason it stays with limited capacity (which has happened to me a couple times) you can solve it by using Gparted, fdisk or similar software, I used to solve that problem on Windows using diskpart.

Why has my 32 GB bootable USB stick shrunk to 3.88 MB

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