Hey everyone, I recently bought a 2TB Toshiba external hard drive. At first, I could see the full capacity, but after trying to adjust some settings to make it visible in my files, it now shows only around 200GB. I can see it connected in my taskbar but not fully in my file explorer. Is there any way to restore its capacity back to 2TB?
4 Answers
You might want to check the Disk Management tool. Right-click on "This PC", choose "Manage", and then navigate to Disk Management. If you can post a screenshot of what you see there, it might help to diagnose the issue better.
It's possible that the drive has unallocated space or weird formatting. Go back to Disk Management and see if there's anything unallocated. You may need to format it to reclaim that space.
When I look at Disk Management, it only shows the partitions for my laptop's storage and nothing for the external drive.
Have you checked if it's partitioned? Sometimes drives can be split into different sections that aren't showing up correctly. You can also see this in Disk Management.
I checked and only my laptop's drive is partitioned. My external drive doesn't show any partitions.
Be careful though! If you purchased it from a seller that seems sketchy, there might be a chance it's a fake drive. There’s a tool called H2testw that can help check if the drive is legitimate. It’s worth a shot if you're concerned about being scammed.
It did come in official Toshiba packaging and the serial number matched, but I’ll still check with H2testw. I’m also thinking of reaching out to the seller for a possible refund or replacement.
Screenshot? Do you think that will help?