External drive lost gb availability

patriceltic · 12 Dec 2018

I recently purchased a Dell 5570-win10. Not sure I like 10 as much as seven but guess I'll get used to it. Anyway, I had a 160gb hp external drive. I stupidly used it as a recovery drive for this new Dell not realizing it would not be available for anything else to be stored on it. I managed to format it and it is now clean however, the properties now say it is 39GB. I don't understand what changed - is there any way I can restore it to its full gb availability? Thanks

Bree · 12 Dec 2018

Welcome to TenForums @patriceltic

Yes, recovery drive will do that. It needs to create a Fat32 partition and 32GB is the maximum size it can create.

Try opening Disk Management. Delete the existing small partition, then you should be able to create a new partition using the whole of the available unallocated space.

Delete Volume or Partition in Windows 10 | Tutorials

patriceltic · 12 Dec 2018

Oh great. I will give it a try and post my results later when back at pc. Thanks so much.

Berton · 12 Dec 2018

I had the same issue when I mistakenly grabbed a 64GB USB Thumb drive when using the MCT/Media Creation Tool to make a bootable USB drive for Win10, it got reformatted to only 32GB FAT32 and remainder couldn't be accessed. To get the 64GB back I had to use the bootable GPARTED LiveCD [available as a free download .iso file or as a program in most versions of Linux] to delete the partition then recreate it full followed by formatting to FAT32. I've used it to partition and format FAT32 on as high as 500GB drives, not possible with Windows' 32GB limit. The main purpose of the 500GB drive was for use on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X [cross-platform]. Mac can usually read NTFS but not natively write to it, needs another program. Windows doesn't have an issue with read/write on large FAT32 partitions, just can't create them.

Bree · 12 Dec 2018

I think the OP would be best off formatting to ntfs for use with Windows, that is unless they need to use their drive with multiple types of OS.

patriceltic · 12 Dec 2018

I did the disk management tool and deleted the volume as shown in the graphic you presented. Now it shows up in device manager but I can't copy anything to it. I put it on my desktop as a shortcut. Is there anything else I can do to make it work?

I just want to do a macrium back up on the dell so don't need to use it on my old win 7 desktop. Thanks.

Berton · 12 Dec 2018

Bree said:

I think the OP would be best off formatting to ntfs for use with Windows, that is unless they need to use their drive with multiple types of OS.

Probably so. The key would be whether MR can work with a bare drive, the OP says there was a deletion but no mention of creating a new partition.

Bree · 12 Dec 2018

In Disk Management, right-click on the unallocated space for that drive. Select 'New simple volume' to create a new partition using the whole of the drive. You can format it in Disk Management as well, or in File Explorer later.

patriceltic · 12 Dec 2018

I rt clicked and it comes up with a simple volume window - asks max 156,xxx and min 8. I guess I can put in 140 for max? or what? this is all new territory for me so sorry for hesitancy. Thanks.

Bree · 12 Dec 2018

Just accept the max it offers, that will make a single partition that uses all the available space on the drive. You only ever use a lower number if you want to make more than one partition.