my 500gb external 7200rpm hdd show up as 33gb

Eliomiller

Reputable
Feb 15, 2015
143
0
4,710
hi. Ive had a laptop from 2010 and its not working anymore( board short) so I decided to take out the hdd and it was still working, as an old 5400rpm 500gb Hitachi drive but well its very slow and may give up on his informations very soon so I decided to copy everything on a drive ive got as a gift from a year, a Seagate one, but well ive used that one before 10 days that happen as a backup drive for a windows 8.1 laptop I'm using now and omg when Ive had done the whole backup process of the still working pc the drive showed only 33gb of total space !!! tried to format it, clean, defragment, try on other computers. I dont think its a hardware issue as I dont think that a big hdd can get physically broke by a backup and loose capacity. how can I get my drive to its initial state of 500gb? thanks
 
Solution
Open Computer Management. On the tree list on the left side, find Storage > Disk Management and click into that. You'll see all the storage mediums that are connected and functioning in your computer.

Find the external hard drive and see if it has any unallocated space or was partitioned without formatting.

theyeti87

Honorable
Open Computer Management. On the tree list on the left side, find Storage > Disk Management and click into that. You'll see all the storage mediums that are connected and functioning in your computer.

Find the external hard drive and see if it has any unallocated space or was partitioned without formatting.
 
Solution

Eliomiller

Reputable
Feb 15, 2015
143
0
4,710
It worked ! It had been partitioned into two partitions where the second one is unallocated so I shrink ed the small one and mad a big partition. Thanks!now how can I do an image of my old drive using that one?