500gb hard drive only shows 232gb available

[SeveredLimb]

Hi,

A friend recently gave me an old hard drive of his after he upgraded. It's a 500gb laptop hard drive that I have mounted in an external cradle to be attached via USB. I want to use it to back up my massive music and video library. When I plugged it in it came up on My Computer as only having 232gb total/available. When I went to Disk Management it says the same thing (see link below). I'm not overly computer savvy but I think something has been done to the partition/volume. Is there a way of getting this hard drive back to it's original 500gb capacity?

Many thanks in advance for you're time and/or response.

http://postimg.org/image/owhzybipp/

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there SeveredLimb,

Are you sure this is not a 250 GB drive? What is its model?
Hard drives that are 250 GB are supposed to show as 232 GB.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[SeveredLimb]

Hi there SeveredLimb,

Are you sure this is not a 250 GB drive? What is its model?
Hard drives that are 250 GB are supposed to show as 232 GB.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

The sticker on the drive itself says 500gb and it was originally his main drive running windows 10 so I guess it must've been bigger than 250gb otherwise it wouldn't have room for the operating system and his personal files. If the missing partitions/volumes are unrecoverable it's not the end of the world as I didn't pay for it, just a shame to lose out on its full potential. I've tried various google searches for people with similar problems but can't find anything that matches this problem. He's not sure if he did something wrong when he formatted it before he gave it to me.

 

[D_Know_WD]

How does the drive appear under BIOS? If it appears as 250 over there as well, and if you are sure it should be a 500 GB drive, then there may be something wrong with it.
Also, you can test it: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/282651-32-best-diagnostic-testing-utility

D_Know_WD

 

[SeveredLimb]

How does the drive appear under BIOS? If it appears as 250 over there as well, and if you are sure it should be a 500 GB drive, then there may be something wrong with it.
Also, you can test it: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/282651-32-best-diagnostic-testing-utility

D_Know_WD

The diagnostic tool on that link say its 250gb but I know it should be 500gb, like I said thats what the label on it says and he was using it as his only internal hard drive in his laptop running Windows 10 and with lots of personal files so it must have been over 250gb. I was there when he removed it and he didn't own any other hard drives that it could've got mistaken for. Confused!! Oh well, 250gb is better than a kick in the nuts, especially as it was free. Many thanks for your assistance though.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Well, somewhere on that label, you should see a model number. You can google that and see what's going to show up.
Also, Win 10 should be about 20 GB. So, a 250 GB drive should do the job.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD