When a drive malfunctions and your system is able to detect only 32 MB of "drive space", I doubt you can actually write to it or read from it. Anyway, why would you if you could? It will all disappear when powered off, because this is only DRAM, not magnetic records.
The original version of LBA, now named "28-bit LBA", allowed the system to specify the address of a data block on the hard disk by a simple single number ranging from 0 to a max, rather than a combination of Cylinder, Head No. and Sector. The HDD unit's on-board controller translates from sequential number to CHS co-ordinates, among its many jobs, and finds what you want. In the initial version of LBA, 28 binary bits were used to define that sequential number, so the maximum number of the last addressable block was (2^28)-1, which is 268,435,455. Now the standard block contains 512 bytes, so the maximum capacity you could address in this system is 137,438,953,472 bytes - hence the disk manufacturer's version of the limit, 137GB. Microsoft, on the other hand, uses the term "GB" to mean 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes, so they call this limit 128 GB.
The newer version of LBA implemented around year 2000 uses 48 binary bits to define the block number, so now the maximum capacity addressable is 144,115,188,075,855,872 bytes, or a bit over 144 Million GB, and we won't get there soon.
Note that nowhere in here is there a 32 MB or 32 GB limit. If your disk is detected at 32 MB, it is NOT because of 28-bit old-style LBA.
Some hard drive makers used a jumper system to limit their larger drives to no more than 28-bit LBA can use. That is just a way to ensure such a drive can be forced to be compatible with older systems. But the result is still that the drive set that way has a capacity of 128 GB, not 32 GB or 32 MB.
There's another way the 32 GB number can come up, if it really is GIGAbytes. If you chose to Format your drive with the older FAT32 File System, its fixed FAT (File Allocation Table) structure (if it uses common Microsoft Allocation Unit size) will limit you to 32 GB of capacity. If that is the case, the solution is to back up any data you have on there already, then Delete all Partitions on the drive, then create on it a new Primary Partition that uses all of the drive and Format that Partition to use the NTFS File System. Then you can use the whole drive.
Oh, the other solution is to stay with the FAT32 File System, but then you have to create on your drive about 5 separate Partitions, each formatted to FAT32, and each treated by your system as separate drives with their own drive letter names.
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