Created an external USB recovery drive and my WD external drive lost capasity from 2TB to 32 GB.

[steinarV]

My HP Z1 Workstation, with an internal solid state drive C: and Windows 10 Professional, has 314 GB used space and 149 GB free. The filesystem is NTFS.

I used “WD My Passport Ultra”, 2 TB from Western Digital, with filesystem NTFS, to create an external USB recovery drive with Windows 10.

The system files, 4.45 GB, on my workstation was backed up to this external drive. When it was done "WD My Passport Ultra" had lost capacity from 2TB to 39GB and the file system on the external drive had changed to FAT32.

Will there be a problem to recover my HP Z1 Workstation, with filesystem NTFS, from the recovery drive with filesystem FAT 32 ?

Can I restore the capasity of the external drive ?

Thank you for comment.

[mdklassen]

Use "Disk Management" to view the partitions on the external disk-drive.

I wonder if there now exist multiple partitions on this drive, and that you are viewing only one partition, and that this partition is formatted as FAT32, and that the other partition(s) span most of the 2TB of space.

[steinarV]

Thank you . . .

I have checked, and there now exist 2 partitions on the external drive.

Do you think I can restore and recover my computer that uses filesystem NTFS, from this drive that has filesystem FAT 32 ?

[mdklassen]

> I have checked, and there now exist 2 partitions on the external drive.

How large is each partition?

> Do you think I can restore and recover my computer that uses filesystem NTFS, from this drive that has filesystem FAT 32 ?

I know that you may do so.

[steinarV]

Thank you again . . .

The size of the primary partition of the external drive is 31,9 GB  (FAT 32).

4,45 GB are used and 27,5 GB are free.

The size of the secondary partition of the external drive is 1831 GB (all free)

[mdklassen]

> The size of the primary partition of the external drive is 31.9 GB  (FAT 32).

> 4.45 GB are used and 27.5 GB are free.

The utility that created this partition probably took the smallest-possible "slice" of your 2000 GB disk-drive, namely 32 GB, due to the architecture of the disk-drive (cylinders & tracks & sectors), and wrote 4.45 GB.

> Can I restore the capacity of the external drive ?

Can you run the utility again, this time writing to an 8 GB USB memory-stick, instead of your 2000 GB external disk-drive? Such a memory-stick would cost about $8 US -- much less than your external disk-drive.

> The size of the secondary partition of the external drive is 1831 GB (all free)

That is a costly waste of its capacity.

So, buy an 8GB USB memory-stick, and write to it.

Then, you can delete that 32 GB partition, and then create a 2000 GB partition on the external disk-drive, to make it 100% for other purposes.

[steinarV · Accepted solution]

An 8 GB USB memory-stick is much better, without doubt.

Thank you !

[steinarV]

An 8 GB USB memory-stick is much better, without doubt.

Thank you !