Really resetting a Hard Drive

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Sindibad

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Jun 2, 2017
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Hi i bought a 2.2 TB hard drive and in disk management it first showed a 1.91TB size and for the format style I chose GPT but then i was curious about MBR and how it compares so i switched it BUT the size went down to 1.86TB so I switched it back to GPT but the size got even less to 1.82TB. And now its alternating between 1.83TB for MBR and 1.82TB for GPT. My question is How do I get my 1.91TB back? Can I restore My HD to its original state again? (It's a 80-90 GB difference)

Edit: I tried this
http://www.disk-partition.com/articles/how-to-remove-gpt-partition-style-0708i.html
but no luck
 
Solution
Colif
Wait a minute... when the drive showed 1.91tb it had no format... you always going to loose space when you format a hdd to either GPT or MBR, my 2tb drive once formatted is 1863.02, Seagate 2tb drives only have 2000gb on them, since they are decimal.

You are not going to get that 90gb back as windows cannot use the drive until its formatted.
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Colif

Colif

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So even after a clean which essentially wipes the drive you are still down space?

you could run dban on drive, that will also wipe it of everything and should give you max space again.

MBR lost you space as it can only see 2tb max and wouldn't see the extra 200gb at all. GPT is the only choice for drives bigger than 2tb

I didn't know they made 2.2tb hdd, very odd size.
 
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Paperdoc

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Using 32-bit addressing in an MBR-Partitioned HDD allows access to a maximum of 4,294,967,296 Sectors. At 512 Bytes per Sector, that is 2,199,023,255,552 Bytes. Windows, using "binary" size counting, calls the "2 TB". HDD makers, using decimal size counting, calls the "2.2 TB". It's the same thing.

As for the "missing" space, I expect it is occupied by one or more small semi-hidden partitions that are supposed to contain system information. Assuming you do NOT want to save anything already on that HDD, and it is NOT your boot device, do what Colif says. Download and use DBAN to Zero-fill your HDD. Then it will be like a brand new totally empty HDD, and you can start fresh.
 
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Colif

Colif

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90gb is an awfully big hidden partition. it probably is in an EFI or MBR part or since he converted twice, both

wouldn't part of problem be he was starting from a 2tb MBR part and converted that to GPT, instead of starting from a 2.2tb blank drive and putting GPT on.

reminds me of the way SSD have extra space on the drives as ram makers use binary, not decimal, so a 1tb ssd actually has 24gb extra space to be used by drive for error correction. The over provisioning portion. And then you come along and format it using windows and convert it back to binary losing about 180gb
 
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Colif

Colif

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Wait a minute... when the drive showed 1.91tb it had no format... you always going to loose space when you format a hdd to either GPT or MBR, my 2tb drive once formatted is 1863.02, Seagate 2tb drives only have 2000gb on them, since they are decimal.

You are not going to get that 90gb back as windows cannot use the drive until its formatted.
 
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