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Question

External hard drive showing far less space than before.

Jul 13, 2017 7:07AM PDT

I used the external hard drive to install windows on my laptop. Afterwards, I deleted everything on the hard drive. Then I went to put the original content onto it, and it didn't fit! It went from having terabytes of memory on to, to 31.9 GB.
It also now shows up as USB EPX or something, rather than the original name (INTENSO). Is there a way to restore the memory to its original capacity?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
which hard drive?
Jul 13, 2017 7:50AM PDT

Which hard drive did you delete? internal or external? When you say memory, you really mean hard drive space, not RAM? You could boot a LIVE DVD of Linux Mint 17.3 and open it's GParted program to let it have a look at the drive. Use the 32 bit if you don't have UEFI on the computer, or the 64 bit if you do.

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Answer
Nod to GPARTED.
Jul 13, 2017 8:07AM PDT

I've lost count of how many drives I've had to use GPARTED to delete all the partitions on a banged up file system and start over.

It's a little more dangerous but a few I had to use DBAN (will wipe drives attached clean!)
And finally a few HDD makers have drive size adjustments but this is only used after the GPARTED and DBAN steps.

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Answer
Re: install
Jul 13, 2017 8:12AM PDT

I never use a an external hard drive to install Windows. I use a DVD or USB-stick with the installer to boot from.

Can you tell the full story about what you did with that external:
- what was on it before you used it to install Windows
- what did you do with the original content
- how did you use it to install Windows on your laptop
- how did you delete everything on it after installing Windows
- how did you (try to) put the original content back

Post was last edited on July 13, 2017 8:15 AM PDT

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Answer
(NT) was this fixed?
Jul 17, 2017 9:09PM PDT