External 250GB hard drive only showing 30GB+?

Hello.

I recently picked up a 250GB external hard drive. When I first got it, it was formatted as NTFS. However, since I wanted to watch movies on my DVD player using the drive, I reformatted it to FAT32. Ever since then, the drive shows a capacity of only about 30+ GB. I tried switching it back to NTFS, but it doesn't seem to fix anything. I guess I'm stuck.😕

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OS: Windows 7 Ultimate, 64-bit
MOTHERBOARD: ASRock 970 Extreme 3
CPU: AMD FX-4100, 3.6GHz (quad-core)
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 6850
RAM: Kingston 8GB (dual-channel)
PSU: 500W

Michael Lee said:Hello.

I recently picked up a 250GB external hard drive. When I first got it, it was formatted as NTFS. However, since I wanted to watch movies on my DVD player using the drive, I reformatted it to FAT32. Ever since then, the drive shows a capacity of only about 30+ GB. I tried switching it back to NTFS, but it doesn't seem to fix anything. I guess I'm stuck.😕

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OS: Windows 7 Ultimate, 64-bit
MOTHERBOARD: ASRock 970 Extreme 3
CPU: AMD FX-4100, 3.6GHz (quad-core)
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 6850
RAM: Kingston 8GB (dual-channel)
PSU: 500W

The 32 GB limit is the standard ceiling for FAT32 on Windows. You can find third-party tools if you need an extended FAT32 option though.
Have you checked Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Computer Management - Disk Management? Or just hit Run and type in diskmgmt.msc.
Try using "delete volume" first, then try formatting it from scratch.

Karen Morgan2 said:The 32 GB limit is the standard ceiling for FAT32 on Windows. You can find third-party tools if you need an extended FAT32 option though.
Have you checked Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Computer Management - Disk Management? Or just hit Run and type in diskmgmt.msc.
Try using "delete volume" first, then try formatting it from scratch.

I suppose I will write back tomorrow afternoon; I don't have the USB drive with me right now. 😉

Honestly, just grab a USB drive since you're hitting that annoying 4GB file limit on FAT32.
Just switch everything back to NTFS, and if you're trying to watch movies on a DVD, just use the thumb drive instead... 😛

The reason your whole drive didn't format properly is because you only switched that 32GB chunk over to NTFS... If you head into Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Computer Management - Disk Management or use some other Partition Tool (like Partition Magic), you can just wipe out all the existing partitions—both the 32GB one and the other one—until you're left with nothing but unallocated space, then just format the whole thing from scratch and you'll be good to go.

I followed the advice from Karen Morgan2 and deleted the volume. After that, my external drive wouldn't show up at all. I tried reinstalling the HDD, but nothing worked. I eventually tried it on another computer, and the drive appeared there. I formatted it on that machine, and now everything seems to be working fine on both computers. 😁

So basically, Karen Morgan2 and I were totally on the same page, just saying the exact same thing using different words