magic hard drive

[sycho1981]

My external hard drive has managed to increase in capacity.

 

I forgot to disconnect it the other day before shutting down my pc and it faied upon restart but when i went to format it it started shownig that i have over double what i should actually have which is great if it's true but somehow i doubt it.

 

Any thoughts?

[Guest Wolfeymole]

Always shut external drives down after shutting the pc down.

 

What size is the external drive sycho and is it possible for you to pop a screen shot on of what it says in Disk Management please?

[sycho1981]

How do i take a screen shot? its a maxtor 500gb

[Guest Wolfeymole]

Right click My Computer and choose Manage.

 

Double click Disk Management in the Storage tree.

 

Click Maximise if need be.

 

Hit the Print Screen or Prt Scr button on your keyboard.

 

Go into Paint in Accessories and hit Ctrl + V

 

Save the image as .jpeg and add it in Manage Attachments on your reply Psycho.

[sycho1981]

there you go, disc 4

[Guest Wolfeymole]

Mmmm there seem to be some serious issues here psycho.

 

Are you saying that besides the Unallocated drive which is obviously wrong you have only 200mb left an a 1TB drive (E) and also 7mb left on the 500GB drive (F)

 

Format that unallocated drive 4 and get back to us.

[sycho1981]

yeah thats not a problem though, there just full up of stuff i recovered when my old drives went down, there not used for running my os though. i did a quick format and it went ok but its done this before and it usually does work ok, its working like it shoud now but i'm still worried about storing anything on it. The size hasnt gone back to normal though

[Guest Wolfeymole]

Don't do a quick format, these are not floppy disks we are dealing with, do a normal format.

[sycho1981]

will do, guessing it might take a whil as its registering as a 1110 gb

[Guest Wolfeymole]

Just let it carry on and in future do not shut any drives down before windows as data exchange is going on all the time.

[sycho1981]

yeah i know i just forgot it was plugged in, i'll get back at you when its done

[Guest Wolfeymole]

Ok mate please do.

[sycho1981]

seems to be working ok, apparently it now has 1.08tb of space available

[Dalo Harkin]

Hmmm - Right -

Depending on what External caddy you have there are a few reasons what could have happened:-

Some Externals when bought have 2 HDD's set up in a RAID configuration so you would have 2x750GB HDD's in the Caddy running in Mirrored mode.

 

When you unplugged it you crashed the RAID system on it and it now shows as a touch over 1TB because its not running in RAID and recognising 2 seperate disks.

 

Third reason is that you could have got a 1.5TB drive but these cost close to £200 so I doubt it :D

[sycho1981]

Nah this was around 60 (on offer). so how do i find out what caddy i have?

[Guest Wolfeymole]

£60 for a 1.5 TB drive?

 

Someone is having a laugh Sycho mate.

[Dalo Harkin]

Nah this was around 60 (on offer). so how do i find out what caddy i have?

 

 

You would still be pushing to get a 1TB one at that price!

what does it say on the actual HDD caddy?

[sycho1981]

its not 1.5tb, well its not meant to be, it was meant to be 500gb

[Dalo Harkin]

Ok - now that sounds more like it - if it was on offer though there could be a chance that there are 2 500GB drives in there -

Dont want to sound sarcastic - but do you know what size a HDD is etc - from that you should be able to tell if there is 1 or 2 drives in the caddy.

[sycho1981]

I thought i did til you just asked me. i assumed it was 500gb (or 465 with partition)

[sycho1981]

or do you mean physically? i.e. inches

[Guest Wolfeymole]

No Dave does not mean the actual physical HDD size Sycho.

 

Can you give us another screen shot so we can see what's happening now please.

[sycho1981]

here you go

[Guest Wolfeymole]

Ok that looks a lot better.

 

Start shifting stuff from C: though as that's getting very full, and E: and F: are completely full.

 

If you don't start shifting stuff soon off C: you will get a Low Disk Space error.

[sycho1981]

will do mate, so do you think that my H drive is ok to use?