We have a 2.5" DTC820 Toshiba 2T USB portable HDD. Right clicking and choosing properties on our Win10 home computer shows:
Used 70 GB
Free 358 GB
Capacity 428 GB
Other portable USB HDD's report capacity correctly.
Clearly something is amiss. How do I trouble shoot the drive? Thanks in advance.
When you select that partition and right-click it, you are only getting details for that partition, not the entire disk.
Is it possible that while this is a 2TB HD, you only have a 428GB partition created on it and that the remaining space is simply unused?
I would suggest opening Disk Management to see what details it shows for that disk.
Disk management shows two partitions, one of 428GB, the other 1,465GB. The smaller one is NTFS and the larger one is EXT4. This might have happened when the drive was used to back up a linux computer we have
I am not very knowledgeable about this, but my thought would be to delete the partition using disk management, and then somehow increase the 428GB partition to the entire available space. Any guidance gratefully received.
Alternatively, I can copy everything on the drive to another, reformat this one to a 2GB single partition and copy the data back. If this seems to others as a best option, should I use NTFS as the format, and are there any other parameters I should select?
Or would you recommend another resolution? TIA
If you are sure that there is nothing that you need on that 1,465GB partition, you certainly could delete it and expand your other drive to occupy that unused space.
1) Open Disk Management
2) Right-click on that large partition and select "Delete volume...".
3) Now, right-click the smaller volume and choose "Extend volume...". Add all the available space.
Thanks for that. I had previously plugged the drive into her linux computer, but when it mounted, I had not noticed that there were two partitions (partly because the Win partition showed up as "Toshiba......" (which I opened) and the other was a series of characters which I just didn't notice that time.) Anyway that HDD is a lot older than I remembered and it was used as a backup for her linux computer in a previous residence. The long and short of it is that there are backups in that partition.
So now I have copied all the files onto her linux computer and plan to delete that EXT4 partition, incorporate that space into the NTFS partition (to occupy the entire 2T drive), and copy the files from her linux computer back to the (now entirely) NTFS partition. I am doing this since the EXT4 partition doesn't work with Windows (or if it does, I don't know how to see it)
However I am unsure if that is going to work as I am thinking it will because the copied files now reside on an EXT4 partition. I assume it will since I copied a few different (.txt., .doc., xls, pdf, etc) files into the the existing NTFS partition and they all opened and worked as expected. Before doing this, just wanted to lay out my plan and see if anyone thinks it may not be a good one?
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