Windows 10: Space on a fat32 formatted external drive

Hello, I have a 750Gb external drive that was originally NTFS. Windows shows it as 698Gb. I formatted it to fat32 yesterday, and now windows reads it as 185Gb. In disk manager, as you can see in the screenshot link (from remote desktop) that I have below, disk manager shows the whole drive as one partition that's 698Gb. However, disk manager says in the list of disks above the partitions that the capacity is 185Gb.

https://i.imgur.com/38Ijf9D.jpg

Why is this happening? Is the 698 or 185 correct?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

:)

 

Recovering lost data from Windows installation USB

Hi,

I created a bootable windows 10 installation USB on 1 TB external drive and I lost important files in the process. The external disk drive was NTFS before being formatted to FAT32, and most of the space is gone.

Is there a tool that re-allocated the lost space and recovers the lost files from the external disk drive?

Thanks

 

Udpdate

Maybe read this;

To upgrade a computer to Windows 10, it requires 16 GB of free hard drive space for a 32-bit OS, and 20 GB for a 64-bit OS. If there is not enough space, attempt to
free up drive space before proceeding with the upgrade.

Note: If your device allows it, you can use an external USB drive for the upgrade process. Windows setup will back up the previous version of Windows to a USB external drive. The external drive must be at least 8GB (16GB is recommended). The external
drive should be formatted using NTFS. Drives that are formatted in FAT32 may run into errors due to FAT32 file size limitations. USB drives are preferred over SD cards because drivers for SD cards are not migrated if the device does not support
Connected Standby.

 

Fat32 partition size is limited to 32GB but there's a runaround. How To Format A Large Hard Drive With Either FAT Or FAT32

 

I already saw that article, in fact, I used fat32 format (listed in that article) to format my drive. The whole drive is. A single partition and was formatted to fat32, or at least I believe so. Look at my screenshot, disk manager shows one big 698Gb fat32 partition. I'm wondering why windows thinks that the whole drive only has a capacity of 185Gb, when the partition reader in disk manager says its 698?

And will this effect my use of the disk?

Also, why isn't it closer to 750gb, like it should be?

 

Unless you have a special reason to use Fat32 (e.g. compatibility with an Android device). I would format the disk in NTFS.

 

Its for booting and running a Debian Linux os.

 

Understand, although Linux supports NTFS also. I would just ignore the 185GB number. I see no rationale explanation for that.

 

Alright, thanks.

Well I had it as NTFS originally and i extracted the iso to the external disk as a bootable. However, when I tried to boot from the external drive it said no operating system found. So I did some searching and read in a few places that it needed to be on a fat32 drive. So I formatted it to fat32 and am trying to boot from that now.

This has been a long and frustrating process, trying to get it to boot from the external drive. I can boot from a CD but I want the os installed on the drive. Maybe it would be better to load the os in a CD and then install it to the external from there?

 

If there is "no operating system found" that means that you either have no active disk or no functioning bootmgr.

 

Have you tried here

http://docs.kali.org/downloading/kal...ve-usb-install

Also

http://docs.kali.org/installation/ka...d-disk-install

 

Hi there
Install package ntfs-3g on your Linux OS - then you can read / write NTFS files.

You might find it's already installed in Debian. If it isn't simply install.

Then you can manually mount NTFS volumes as READ /WRITE

sudo mount /dev/sdx -t ntfs -o rw /yourdir

(Or use fstab for automatic mount at boot / SAMBA for share etc etc etc).

If you are Native booting the OS (i.e dual boot) the Linux partition will need to have a recognised file system - on my CENTOS system I use XFS, but ext3/4 is also good.

So the following :

1) Install Linux on your HDD - set partition size(s) at install - don't forget swap partition too.
2) Leave rest of space as NTFS - create Primary partition
3) install package ntfs-3g on the Linux OS if not already installed
4) boot OS
5) mount Windows NTFS partition -- this will show up as either /dev/sdx or /dev/hdx in Linux

Job done.

(The Linux Boot manager GRUB will present Windows and Linux if you have Windows on the same HDD. Rather than dual boot from the same HDD - why not simply in the BIOS choose which HDD you want to boot from and have the OS'es on separate HDD's.
Note you can still access all the NTFS partitions from the Linux OS provided the ntfs-3g package is installed).

An even easier solution is to decide which OS is your main OS and run the other one as a Virtual Machine !!.

Cheers
jimbo

 

Why not using a supported Linux filesystem if you are going to use Linux (EXT2, EXT3, Reiser, whatever)?

 

I recently had need for a 250GB HDD [in a portable case] for a Mac OS X computer that could also be used on a Windows PC. I used a small free program called GPARTED, a downloaded .iso file used to create a bootable CD which runs a version of Linux to partition and format that 250GB to FAT32. Another program I bought can do the same, Spotmau's PowerSuite, but is has a lot more things it can do so has been valuable in things I do.
GParted -- Download