USB drive seen as 32Gb

50Twuncle

I have a 500Gb "WD MyPassport" USB3 drive that I can only access 32Gb......
I have downloaded a utility "HPUSBDisk.exe" which, when run - displays the full 465Gb as NTFS - But as soon as I try to use the drive (under NTFS) - it appears to reformat itself as FAT32 - Which is annoying - any solution ?

System

It sounds as though it has been formatted as FAT32. So you will have a 32GB primary partition (which is what you see) and 430GB as unpartitioned.

Go into Disk Manager (Click start and typoe 'Disk Management' and you should see 'Create and Format disk partitions' appear. Click on this

In disk manager you should be able to see your Mypassport. Delete the partition and screate a new partition using the whole of the disk. You will need to make it NTFS because MS in their infinite wisdom have limited you to creating a max 32GB partition in Windows without using an external program to do it.

kwikbreaks

Check in Disk Manager - Open Windows Explorer - Computer right click and select Manage. Select Disk management toward the bottom left.

The chances are you will see a 32GB partition and the rest as free space. Google suggests others have had this happen but it isn't obvious how or why.

If there is nothing on it you want just delete the 32GB partition then add a partition occupying the full disk and format it. If you plan tto store files over 4GB (eg hd movies) make sure to format it NTFS.

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Ah beaten to it. I didn't realise FAT32 limited you to 32GB - that's clearly why it happens.

System

kwikbreaks wrote: »

I didn't realise FAT32 limited you to 32GB - that's clearly why it happens.

A good explanation and comparisons of file systems is here

Oblivion

Well I have a 64GB flash drive that is quite happily employing all 64GB under FAT32 but perhaps I should reformat it to exFAT for better efficiency?

System

I bet it came ready formatted and you haven't tried to reformat it FAT32?

Windows (without additional software) won't allow you to format it as FAT32 64GB but is quite happy to read and write to it once formatted by something else

John_Gray

Probably it's worth people reading this article Maximum Size of a FAT-32 Partition.

If you have a Windows operating system newer than XP, then there is no practical limit to the partition size for FAT-32 (unless you've got a disk bigger than 8 TB!), but the maximum file size for FAT-32 is still 4 GB. Because of the very large cluster size needed for large FAT-32 partitions, you would lose a lot of disk space if you had a large number of small files.

In most circumstances, NTFS is a better bet.

Oblivion

!!!!!! wrote: »

I bet it came ready formatted and you haven't tried to reformat it FAT32?

Windows (without additional software) won't allow you to format it as FAT32 64GB but is quite happy to read and write to it once formatted by something else

Yes, you're right, the 64GB Sandisk Extreme USB3 stick came ready formatted to FAT 32. I'm running Windows 7 and I had a look at the reformat options and it is only offering NTFS and nothing else, not FAT32 nor, surprisingly, exFAT.