I purchased a 500 GB USB drive. Based on another problem I downloaded Windows 10 supposedly bootable USB files. The procedure erased my 500GB SSD and installed the supposedly bootable USB files.I ultimately used a bootable DVD drive instead.
Now the 500GB SSD shows as a 30 GB drive. I reformatted and still the capacity is only 30 GB. How do I get full capacity back?
Use MiniTool Partition Wizard to check what partitions are on the drive, I suspect you have c 470GB of unallocated space for some reason. If so, you should be able to expand the C: partition to use that space.
See the tutorial from step 13 to see how to configure the installation Clean Install Windows 10
It seems the drive became a single 30 GB partition, marked as ESD-USB. If I am right, the original partition has been overwritten by this new 30GB partition. And you may need to directly recover data from the drive. MiniTool Power Data Recovery could help you in this regard. Please scan the whole disk, not the existing 30GB partition. In addition, don't recover the data back to this drive, it may overwrite the lost files.
Hope this can help you and good luck!
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