How to Change Bootable External Hard Drive Back to Normal?

[Ridhwan Yottapsye]

Hi. I've turned an external hard drive into a bootable drive (in order to install Windows 10). This caused the external hard drive's capacity to decrease from 1TB to 32gb. Is it possible to change the capacity back to 1TB (undo the change)?

Thanks in advance.

 

[USAFRet]

Hi. I've turned an external hard drive into a bootable drive (in order to install Windows 10). This caused the external hard drive's capacity to decrease from 1TB to 32gb. Is it possible to change the capacity back to 1TB (undo the change)?

Thanks in advance.

Commandline diskpart
Delete all existing partitions and reformat it.

Be very, very careful of which drive you are accessing.

 

[Ridhwan Yottapsye]

Hi USAFRet,

Thank you very much. I was able to delete the partition that had the size, 32GB. However I ran into a problem. Since that was the only partition, the external hard drive is no longer recognized by diskpart or This PC. I don't think I can reformat it yet. Could you help me out?

Thanks very much, in advance.

 

[USAFRet]

Hi USAFRet,

Thank you very much. I was able to delete the partition that had the size, 32GB. However I ran into a problem. Since that was the only partition, the external hard drive is no longer recognized by diskpart or This PC. I don't think I can reformat it yet. Could you help me out?

Thanks very much, in advance.

Not recognized at all in diskpart?
Possibly reboot your system?

 

[Ridhwan Yottapsye]

Sorry; you're right. I do not see the volume anymore, since I've deleted it. But I think I see the external hard drive as a disk.

I see three disks. One's my SSD. The other two have the exact same amount of disk space (931GB), but one of them has 0GB free space and the other has the full 931GB as free space. Under My PC, the hard drive has 916GB free space. So I don't know which one to format.

Could you please offer some guidance? I think this would be the last step. Thank you very much!

 

[USAFRet]

Sorry; you're right. I do not see the volume anymore, since I've deleted it. But I think I see the external hard drive as a disk.

I see three disks. One's my SSD. The other two have the exact same amount of disk space (931GB), but one of them has 0GB free space and the other has the full 931GB as free space. Under My PC, the hard drive has 916GB free space. So I don't know which one to format.

Could you please offer some guidance? I think this would be the last step. Thank you very much!

1. Can you show us a screencap of your Disk Management Wwindow?

2. Open Disk Management, and take note of the drives....Which one is Drive 1, Drive 2, etc.
Power off
Disconnect this external drive.
Power up
Open Disk Management again....the one that is now missing it the external one that needs attention.

 

[Ridhwan Yottapsye]

Thanks very much, USAFRet! It is done. I used Disk Management to format the drive and everything's ok now! Thanks so much!