Where's the metadata?

[Quartz]

> The problem is that now, the Windows system seems to think that the
> size of the thing is only something like 24.2 Megabytes... *not* the
> actual size, which is vastly larger (16GB).

>but then at the last second I hesitate and decide to
> actually try to _understand_ what's going on here, really, for a change.

By default, when looking with disks in explorer, windows will only mess 
with partitions (slices). In this case, your usb drive has a single 
partition just big enough to hold the installer, with the remainder of 
the drive being dead space. You need to delete this partition and create 
a new one that spans the entire size of the drive. Unfortunately, 
windows doesn't make this as easy as it should be. You'll need to open 
your control panel -> administrative tools -> computer management -> 
disk management


> So now I'm reading the man page for glabel(8)

glabel is totally not related to your problem at all. glabel is for when 
you want to refer to disks via a user created identifier string when you 
can't rely on the device id.


> P.P.S.  So what _is_ the best tool for just simply taking some sort of
> drive... like a USB flash drive, or any other kind of drive for that
> matter... and returning it to it's actual size?

Use a real partitioning program as opposed to the crap built into the 
windows right-click menu. On freebsd, this would be 'gpart'.

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it has a certain smooth-brained appeal