External Hard Drive Showing Significantly Less Than Capacity

[teffey_2003 10]

Hi All

 

I've just received an external hard drive, which when I attached it to the main pc, is showing significantly less than capacity, It's meant to be 160gb, which when I check it, it's only showing 99.99mb. Can someone point me in the right direction of where I am going wrong please? Thanks in advance

 

 

 

[zach 234]

System reserved is usually a part of a pre installed OS.

 

Look at the drive in disk manager and re-format/delete all the old partitions then create a single partition, that should bring it back to a full size.

 

If you have any files on it, back them up first.

[teffey_2003 10]

Thanks for the advice. I've just purchased it and it's arrived this morning. How do I look at the drive in disk manager? Sorry for sounding thick. Just assumed I would receive it and it would just be a case of plugging in and it would be fine

[zach 234]

Use search and type disk manager

 

Then follow these instructions

 

Open disk manager and find the disk number (make 100% sure you get the right one)

Open a Command Prompt (cmd in search box, right click and run as admin)

In the command prompt window type  diskpart and press enter key

In the command prompt window type select disk x and press enter(x is the disk number from step 1)

In the command prompt window type clean and press enter

Back in disk manager the disk will need to be setup/formatted

 

It looks like you use Windows 7, set it as MBR then format to NTFS

 

Does that help? I know it looks a bit daunting but it only takes a few minutes but you MUST make 100% sure you get the right disk number. It will wipe everything on the selected drive.

 

Let us know if you need more help.

 

EDIT: You can try just deleting the partitions on the drive in disk manager but it might give an error on certain partitions. If the drive was sold as new, I'd be having words as it looks like a used drive.

Edited April 22, 2020 by zach

[teffey_2003 10]

Thanks for your help - seem to be getting somewhere with it now

[zach 234]

2 minutes ago, teffey_2003 said:

Thanks for your help - seem to be getting somewhere with it now

No problem.

 

Plenty of helpful people in this section that will get it sorted for you if you run into more problems.

[RabM 16]

On 22/04/2020 at 13:01, zach said:

If the drive was sold as new, I'd be having words as it looks like a used drive.

Agreed.  I've seen a few Amazon reviews complaining about this with SanDisk SSDs with "no-fuss" packaging.