The Free TV Blog - Satellite & Digital TV in Ireland

Periodically we are asked by customers about an issue that can occur when formatting an External Hard Drive from NTFS to FAT32.   Depending on the size of your external hard drive and the program that you used to convert from NTFS to FAT32, the size of the drive after the formatting process can be reduced dramatically.  For example, a 1TB drive becomes something like a 200-300GB drive.   This isn’t desirable at all and you have lost a lot of usable space on the external hard drive.

What we have found in our own tests is that generally speaking, if you are to format a drive from NTFS to FAT32, then if the drive is under 500GB, then the process works really well with the vast majority of programs.   Once you go above 500GB, then a fair percentage of the time, this problem can rear it’s ugly head.

So what can you do?   If you look in the above video, you can see how to recover the lost space on your external hard drive and re-convert it to FAT32 from NTFS and get it to recognise the fully capacity of the drive.

Tags: convert, external hard drive, format, how to fix, how to recover, ntfs to fat32, recover lost space

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 21st, 2012 at 5:38 am and is filed under External Hard Drives. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.