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external hard drive shrinked

2K views 11 replies 4 participants last post by  spunk.funk 
#1 ·
I have Toshiba external hard drive v73600-c with 1tb. I got a new laptop inspiron 5547 with window 8.1. I tried to create a recovery drive to be able to recover the system if something happened. I had four partiotions on external drive and one of them was partition F with 240gb and I specified this partition to create a recovery drive. It warned me that everything will be lost. I understood that it meant the partition I specified. The system tried to format and returned me an error that it cannot format. At the end I found my external drive was shrinked to 34 gb from 1tb and all other partiontions disappeared. I just wandering what happened, why it return me the error withour any explanation offered and why my external hard drive shrinked from 1tb to 34 gb and what happened to my other partiones and to entire disk. Is it possible to recover the space on this external drive and see what happened to other partitions?
 
#2 ·
There is always a risk when changing partition information AFTER a drive has been formatted. It is generally recommended to not make partition changes on a drive currently partitioned/formatted and in use. The warning was referring to any data that may be stored on the DRIVE, not just the partition that was being changed. Changing one partition can affect other partitions.

Using Disk Manager or the drive manufacturers disk tools, delete all of the partitions and start over.

I personally recommend against using partitions, but they can be useful in some situations.

Also note that if there is any data on the drive that you don't want to lose, you will need to try and recover the data before performing any other actions.
 
#3 ·
#4 ·
Dear JimE and Rich-M,
thank you for your response. I probably wasn't clear enough. The external hard drive that used to have 4 partitions and 1 tb of space lost all partitions and the file explorer used to address it as external hard drive and show all four partitions with 240 gb each, now it call the disk as local disk E: and it show total space 34 gb, used 160 kb and free 32 gb. I cannot remove not existing any longer partiotions and I lost 966 gb of space I don't know where this space is and how to retrieve it back. Is it possible? What are my options? Is there any way to save this external hard drive?
 
#5 ·
What is the device status in Drive Manager?

You should be able to use Windows or Disk Management software to delete any current partitions or simply create a new partition.

The current size rating could be the result of a faulty drive, or it is simply corrupted. In which case, creating new partitions as noted above should resolve the problem.
 
#6 ·
The device manager on property of the hard drive tells: "This device is working properly", and the events show the following: Driver Management has concluded the process to add Service WUDFWpdFs for Device Instance ID SWD\WPDBUSENUM\{CAB61A50-87E9-11E4-825B-303A64791EFD}#0000000000100000 with the following status: 0.
I'm not the computer expert and hopeless in this situation. I have no idea what to do and how to get back the space that is disappeared as a mistery. Please help with as much details as it is possible.
Thank you and have a great holidays.
 
#8 ·
JimE,
the file explorer shows no partiotions on this hard drive. It shows that this drive has 32gb free space instead of 1tb and there is nothing on this hard drive. There is nothing to delete or to remove. Is there a way to get back the 1 tb of space?
 
#9 ·
I am suggesting you use third party software in case the problem is your Windows is corrupted but that is the only way you will know for sure if there is unallocated space on the drive, which I would bet there is. If not then the drive is shot and nothing you do will get it back.
 
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