New External Hard Drive 1TB but Only Has 25GB?

[mschultz]

Hello!

I have a brand new Seagate Backup Plus Slim external hard drive with 1TB of space for Windows and Mac and I am trying to use it on a healthy Windows 10-Home gaming laptop. I tested it through both a 3.0 and 2.0 usb port.

When I tried to copy over a folder (about 60GB), and this was the first time copying anything over, I got a message saying there's only 25GB free. (?) The properties tab and disc management tools both say I've got 930-something GB free.

It came with about 44MB of stuff in a folder, which I was able to move off of it without issue. I went to the disc management tool and saw that the partition was RAW so I tried formatting to NTFS. No dice. I tried exFat--didn't work. I tried making two partitions, and that didn't work. when I made the single partitions, I tried formatting, quick formatting, deleting the existing partition and then making a new one, and still no luck.

I tried going through the files that came loaded on the hard drive and they didn't help. I tried running Start Here Windows which caused a SeaGate splash screen to appear and then it brought me to their website where I registered the product with my serial number. Didn't fix anything. Maybe I should have double clicked that before messing with the disk partition? The instruction booklet didn't say anything about just about anything.

Any idea about how to get more than 25GB out of this TB hdd? Do you think it's a lemon? Would I be able to return it?

 

[CountMike]

Did you also look at it in Device Manager ?

 

[RealBeast]

I would probably just go ahead and clean it and reformat, if that won't work then consider a replacement.

If you are only going to use it for Windows, then attach it to your computer, open an elevated command prompt (right click on command prompt and run as admin) and clean it with diskpart by entering the following:

diskpart
list disk
select disk n (where n is the external drive -- and be careful to make the correct choice)
clean
exit

Now go into disk management and initialize it as an MBR type disk and do an NTFS format (quick format is okay).

 

[mschultz]

Thanks for the advice. I tried the clean and format thing with cmd with both GPT and MBR, and while it did bring me to new places I hadn't seen before, it didn't solve the problem. Any other ideas?

 

[RealBeast]

After those relatively simple steps, if you have the time and inclination I usually then try to mount the drive in a Live Linux USB stick (I like either Mint or Ubuntu). It is quite simple to make the USB boot stick with THIS free tool that will automatically download the Linux version of choice and create the bootable stick.

Since it is a Seagate drive, download SeaTools for Windows and test the drive -- if it fails or cannot see it then I would RMA the drive for a new one.