Windows 10: external HDD appears offline and unallocated space. [solution]

I am opening this topic because there are hundreds of topics opened on Microsoft with the same title and many Microsoft representatives cannot answer users correctly. In most of the tickets, she suggested assigning a new drive letter, formatting it, or many other unnecessary solutions.But this issue that I have opened now will be a definitive solution for those who have the same problem in the future.I connected the external HDD of my approximately 10-year-old laptop to my desktop computer with a USB cable. The HDD booted without any problems. I installed all my programs on the computer to the

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Unallocated Space to C Drive

Thanks

 

Unallocated Space to C Drive

Hi Travis,

It appears that a disk partition was created but was never assigned its allocation. Assuming there are no files stored in the unallocated partition, perform these steps to combine it with your C: drive:

• In Disk Management, right-click on (C which appears next to the
  Unallocated partition.
  
• Select Extend.

Let us know if you're able to combine the spaces after following the steps above.

Regards.

 

Can't reclaim offline file space on HDD

I can't work out how to reclaim offline file space on my HDD

I was using a large amount of space for offline file storage on the disk

I now want to use this space for conventional storage. I've tried the following steps:

1. I simply disabled offline files and rebooted. However it appeared that the space previously used for the offline files remained reserved by the system. So even though I have 1.5TB of files on a 3.5TB HDD it is showing < 1TB available.

2. I re-enabled offline files and tried reducing the space limit. Windows wouldn't let me reduce it beyond the amount of space taken by the offline files that it had retained from when it was previously enabled.

3. I tried deleting the offline files in the offline files manager. This succeeded in deleting some but not all of the files.

4. I tried resetting the cache using a regedit. This allowed me to reduce the file limit a little (due to having deleted some files).

5. I then tried disabling again. However, the problem remained that the space reserved prior to disabling was still allocated by the system and therefore I have only succeeded in freeing up a small amount of space.

There's no logical reason why disabling shouldn't succeed in unallocating that space and allowing me to overwrite it with conventional storage.

W11 Pro ver 21H2 build 22000.856

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10875H CPU @ 2.30GHz 2.30 GHz