New 1TB External Hard Drive

[cricket_guru]

Hi

I Just bought 1TB External Hard Drive and straight away, I created 3 partitions using Partition Magic 8.05. I then deleted all the partitions as I decided to have 2 partitons only. As I was about create the 2 new partitions, I realised I now have 1.5TB space on my external hard drive.

1) How is this possible?
2) Is this good or bad?

Thanks in advance.

 

[sohum]

Umm.............. that sounds like a software problem. Try reformatting the whole drive to see how much HD space you have.

 

[cricket_guru]

Umm.............. that sounds like a software problem. Try reformatting the whole drive to see how much HD space you have.

Tried it - still got 1.57TB

cricket_guru added 1 Minutes and 50 Seconds later...

Don't know if this helps but...

first partition was FAT32 and the other 2 were NTFS

 

[Ollie_H]

surely its a good thing you now have that extra .57TB's?

 

[cricket_guru]

surely its a good thing you now have that extra .57TB's?

I hope so - I'm just a bit worried about my data getting corrupted.

Thats why I thought I ask on here if its good or bad so I can get exchanged.

 

[Abhas]

Get it exchanged. There are no free lunches.

 

[angryangy]

Do it again, create a 2TB drive.

 

[sohum]

Get it exchanged. There are no free lunches.

Haha... unless the company messed up.

If you can get it reformatted on a different operating system/computer, try that as well. Just to make sure. Otherwise I'd say you scored yourself a deal (or maybe your OS is messing up since the drive is so huge).

 

[Kev]

Probably down to the way different software actually report sizes of drives.

XP I think will report a 1TB drive on NTFS as just under 1TB, probably somewhere around 950gig.
It all comes down to how the software adds up the bytes. For example a kilobyte is sometimes 1000bytes and sometimes 1024bytes. Over drives as large as 1Tb I guess errors like this can become quite big.

Also FAT32 will waste tonnes of space giving you a smaller usable amount of storage when compared to the more efficient NTFS.

 

[Abhas]

Don't really know the exact reason, but it is certainly a software issue. I remember something like this happening to my ipod. My 30 gb suddenly became 120. I had to format it to get it back to normalcy ; ) i had used a 3rd party app to manage music just before this happened, so i think these 2 cases are similar. Try deleting all partitions and then do a full format with the windows utility. Don't partition it yet. Also keep it ntfs...fat32 cannot handle such large drives. If the space returns to normal then partition it.

 

[sohum]

I had this problem with my old Presario of about 16 years ago. My total hard disk space was 100MB but I had files that were reported as being more than 1 GB on the disk!

When you reformat, make sure you're not doing the quick format. Also, consider getting a good third-party utility to reformat.

 

[m_vaughan]

Presario 16 years ago? I had an XT back then, which was also my first computer.

 

[sohum]

Presario 16 years ago? I had an XT back then, which was also my first computer.

It was between 14 and 16 years ago. But yeah, long time. Cost a fortune as well. I remember how difficult it was to control the mouse back then, computers being new and everything.

 

[siddharth2002]

Blow away all the partitions and try formatting with Windows built-in Disk Management.