noidea_77 :
More details please: what do you mean by resetting the chromebook and why do you have to use an external hdd to do so? What was the reason to rest the chromebook? What's the orig capacity of the hdd and what is it showing now? Can you test the hdd with another device?
My son brought home his chromebook with a message on startup that the operating system was corrupted so I used the chrome recovery app to make a recovery flash drive (also tried with an sd cards and eventually the ext hard drive out of desperation). The chromebook responds by saying an unexpected error has occurred. Tried the paperclip hole in the back while plugging in the power supply which also didnt reset the chomebook. The only reason I tried the hard drive was because i was reading about a lot of compatability issues between the chromebook and loading the recovery from certain types of flash drives (and this one was a cheapie one so i couldnt even find a brand name on it). So I guess I figured, "Hey the ext HD is empty anyways, so why not try to use it as a giant flash drive?" Which was apparently not a good idea, however, since the flash drive is also messed up and so is the sd card, I think it was a problem with the chromebook operating system as opposed to the drives themselves. Original capacity of the hdd was 1TB and now shows as 15.8 megs. The flash drive was 4 gbs and is now saying 13.9 megs. The SD card was 16 gigs and now says 13.8 megs. And yes, I tested all but the card with another device (I can't test the card because I don't have another card reader). I don't know what he did to his chromebook - He is ten and has 2 homes and I haven't seen him in about 3 weeks. I asked him the last thing he remembers doing with it and he said he read his email, looked at some pictures of his friend at some kind of derby and shut it down for the night. It wouldn't properly start the next morning. Last thing he remembers downloading was some kind of theme from the chrome app store. He drops and knocks the computer around a lot. I am not sure what is going on here, but I have read other things about people plugging their drives into linux based systems and having this capacity problem afterwards. Only thing is, they can run the recovery software and I cannot. Before anyone asks, I have tried formatting all 3 storage devices in FAT NTFS and exFAT - nothing fixes the capacity.