Adata 750GB external hard drive turns into 32GB

marcokleinrossi

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Sep 2, 2013
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I wanted to back up windows 8 incase my SSD crashes so i read an article that said i had to create a system recovery drive before I create a system image. I decided to use the external hard drive a the recovery drive as soon as that process finished, my total space
from the hard drive went from 750GB to 32GB. I do not mean the total space available is now 32GB, I mean the total space ob the hard drive is now 32GB AND total space available is less than 32 since the
files from the recovery drive took some space. Does anyone know why this happened and how to get it back up to 750GB even if it means deleted these files?

Edit: whenever i plug in the external hard drive it just shows up as a recovery drive. Could it be that it was formatted a a recovery drive and how can i get it back to its original format?
 
Solution
Its now a recovery drive, you should reformat it and use something like Acronis or Clonezilla to make image of the recovery partition.

Use the disk manager to zap the drive and reformat as native NTFS.

marcokleinrossi

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Ok a couple of questions:
1. How to i access the disk manager
2. How do i zap the drive?

 

gorskiegangsta

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The reason the drive appears smaller in capacity is probably because the drive was partitioned to use only 32GB with the rest being unallocated. If that is the case, you can easily "bring back" the missing capacity by:

1. Open disk manager (here's how: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows-8/a/disk-management-windows-8.htm)
2. Find your drive in the "volume" list; make sure it is indeed the one you want by comparing its drive letter to the one in "my computer"
3. Below the disk list there should also be a list of these same drives, but broken up into partitions (e.g. disk 0, disk 1, etc..) find the drive there (partition drive letter is a hint); It should have a part with black bar called "unallocated".

From here on, if you wish to keep the recovery drive partition, you can either:
a. Right click on the recovery partition and choose "extend volume"; then just go through the setup wizard to extend the volume to its original capacity
b. If the "extend volume" option isn't available, or if it suits you better, you can create a second partition on the drive, by just right-clicking on the unallocated part and going through the setup wizard. This will make it appear as if you connect two separate drives (instead of just one) every time you connect the external hard drive.
If you don't care for recovery partition, then just delete the recovery partition (right click and "delete volume") and then do step 4b