external hard drive malfunctioning

[bolshy]

i bought an external hard drive maybe 4 or so months ago and it's been working fine up until now. it's a seagate backup plus 5 tb drive. i installed seatools in an attempt to fix the problem but that was a dead end as it said it found no problems. the problem that i'm having is that the hard drive only has 236 kb of space available. that's quite a bit of a drop from the 5 tb that it's supposed to be. i've attempted to put files in that are 250kb+ and they don't fit. there's absolutely nothing on the hard drive right now, completely free of space. formatting the drive didn't help, but i did notice that in disk management, it's still showing the 5 tb of space being open. somewhere in between the hard dive is being fooled into thinking it has pretty much no space on it, but i don't know where. i've tried putting the drive on 3 different computers: 1 windows 10, 1 windows 8 and 1 linux. all 3 had same results

 

[CountMike]

Run diskmgmt.msc and see how it's partitioned.

 

[bolshy]

Run diskmgmt.msc and see how it's partitioned.

GPT partition

 

[Ubrales]

Download and run HDTune, and/or CrystalDiskInfo - check results.

 

[bolshy]

Download and run HDTune, and/or CrystalDiskInfo - check results.

currently doing a hdtune error scan. 4 hours in and not even 10% done yet. none of the blocks are damaged yet so i don't think that's the problem since the whole hard drive is pretty much inaccessible

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there bolshy,

How is the drive recognized by BIOS? In case it shows as having 236 kb of storage space, then I guess the device has failed. My suggestion would be to contact the manufacturer and eventually RMA it.
In case it shows as having its full capacity in BIOS, you need to go to Disk Management. Do you see some unallocated space? I thing it would be best to use some third party tool and write zeros on the drive. In case you have some data stored on it, you need to back it up.

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD