Have i killed my external HDD?

longwalks1

Have a 500Gb external drive, copied all my files off it onto my shiney new 1Tb one, but it showed still about 11Gb was used on it? total of 465Gb, free space 453 Gb. Tried formatting it and it went all worng

Any ideas how to get it to show up as a drive again? want to format it to sell to a lad at work

Thanks in advance

fwor

For various reasons, a 500GB drive will never show as having an actual capacity of 500GB - without doing any detailed googling, 465GB sounds about right.

How you format it depends a bit on what OS you have, but for starters - when you plug it in, is it recognised at all in Disk Management (assuming you have a recent version of Windows)? If so, you can format it from there.

Hammyman

Windows and the hard drive manufacturers use different values for 1GB. The hard drive manufacturers use base 10 so 1GB is 1000 MB.
Windows, Linux and other OS use binary base 2 values so 1GB as far as the OS is concerned is 1024MB. 500,000/1024 = 488 so thats what the bare unformatted drive would be seen as in your OS. Then there's the overheads as well which includes partition information which uses a bit more. You would also find that Windows would have put some hidden system files on there as well - for example there'd be a hidden folder called Recycler and followed by some numbers which is the recycle bin for that drive.

John_Gray

Look up gibibyte on Wikipedia! Although "gibi" is an internationally-recognised standard prefix, I don't think it will catch on, even among the technorati...

longwalks1

fwor wrote: »

For various reasons, a 500GB drive will never show as having an actual capacity of 500GB - without doing any detailed googling, 465GB sounds about right.

How you format it depends a bit on what OS you have, but for starters - when you plug it in, is it recognised at all in Disk Management (assuming you have a recent version of Windows)? If so, you can format it from there.

Its recognised in 'Computer' option, but right click and it shows 0 bytes, 0 used and 0 available?