For instance, show hidden files and perform anti-virus to check whether the hard drive shows full capacity or not. So, when you find a new hard drive showing less disk space than it advertised, go to "My Computer" (in Windows 7 and 8) or "This PC" (in Windows 8.1 and 10) > "Manage" > "Disk Management" and check the real space taking by the recovery partition.įor other simple causes, you can troubleshoot quickly. Many hard drives are with an OEM partition or recovery partition for factory restore purpose, and it's usually invisible in My Computer. Master Boot Record or EFI information area (GPT header) corrupts due to accidental insertion and removal.Īs you can tell, not all the events require fixes.That's because the MBR partition table cannot address the space that exceeds 2TB. If it is larger than 2TB, but initialized to be MBR, the space over 2TB will be shown as "Unallocated" in Disk Management and you can't see it in File Explorer. The hard drive has been initialized to a wrong partition table.Format the hard drive using an inappropriate tool, or the formatting process is incomplete.In this case, the hard drive might show the wrong capacity in the Windows computer. In addition to what just mentioned, we list other common causes to help you understand why your (external) hard drive is showing the wrong capacity or free space. Like hidden files, formatting overhead, virus attack, recovery partitions occupancy, a hard drive issue, etc. Why Hard Drive Not Showing Full CapacityĮxcluding that you have bought a fake hard drive from an unscrupulous merchant, there are several reasons Windows could display the wrong amount of available space. There are quite a few reasons that lead to a hard drive showing less space than it should. Is your hard drive corrupted when it shows the wrong capacity? Not really. Some external hard disks and USB flash drives may show another incorrect capacity issue that the free space size hugely decreases. What happened? Why is the hard drive showing the wrong free space? Can I restore the full size? And how?"Ī newly bought 500 GB HDD might display only 465 GB even with no data on it. That's impossible because the used space can't be more than 200GB. But today, I surprisingly find that the free space is only 0.18TB. It's 1TB advertised, and I only use it as a backup hard drive. "My WD external hard drive gets a strange problem. What demonstrated below is a real story of a user telling his 1TB hard drive showing only 0.18TB of free space. Hard Drive Showing Wrong Free Space Problem You should check and repair partition errors to rectify the problem. In Windows 10/8, press "Windows + R" key, type diskmgmt.msc and click OK.
You can fix this problem by converting MBR to GPT and then extend the partition. Full stepsĬlick "Start", type cmd in the search box. Click "Start", type Device Manager, and press "Enter".
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