Can not reclaim hard drive free space

[harrillj]

Hello,
I have an external USB - FIrewire 800 Lacie Big Disk 320 GB drive that shows most of it as used space of which I can not get back even through I have formatted the drive over and over, both quick and low level. Everytime I do a quick format, I right mouse click and it shows 73 GB USED and the 230 GB as FREE. When I do a low level format it shows 302 GB used and about 3 GB FREE.

I contacted Lacie tech support. They had me do this:

Go to DOS prompt
enter DISKPART
enter SELECT DISK XX
enter CLEAN
close DOS prompt
go to DISK MANAGEMENT
reinitialize and create a primary partition
format

I did the above and the same things happens. The low level format goes too fast, just a couple minutes and it is done which is cleary too fast for 320 GB drive.

Lacie told me to send the drive back under warranty, but lucky me I am 17 days past warranty so it is not covered. I have $400 drive that does not work. I was hoping someone else had come across this and had a fix.

Thanks

 

[birdpup]

Formatting a drive only creates a filesystem on the harddrive. Formatting is not useful for changing the amount of accessible space on the hard drive.

You want to concentrate your efforts on creating the drive partition(s) that will allow access to the whole hard drive. (320 * 10^9) / (1024^3) = 298 GB real space that can be accessed.

There are different tools available for this but be extremely careful with them since it is easy to accidentally delete your windows system hard drive and lose all your data.

One tool is used from within the windows operating system called Disk Management as you have already worked with. Another method of accessing Disk Management is:
right-click My Computer -> Select Manage -> Select Storage/Disk Management

I am not sure if other commonly used tools such as fdisk, cfdisk, Parted, and QtParted are helpful with accessing an external USB hard drive since I have never tried this. These utilities are included in the linux installation routine when installing linux. QtParted is available in a knoppix livecd and in the Mandriva/Mandrake install routine.

I recommend going into Disk Management, delete all partitions within the external hard drive, and then create a new partition for the whole drive, for a size of 298GB. Please try this and provide an update if this does not help. It may be a good idea to try partitioning with these various tools but in this order: Windows Disk Management, Windows installation routine but exit directly after creating the partition in the external USB hard drive, Mandriva install routine, FreeBSD install routine.

Also, try the Lacie/support/drivers page and see if you can update the drive or use any of their provided utilities.

If you are not using Windows XP, then you will need to install this driver to access the drive with USB. USB 2 Driver (May 6, 2004)
That brings up the question, which operating system are you using and are you using USB or Firewire?

I think this is the utility you should work with. Device Updater 2.1.0 for Windows (June 22, 2005)

Did you already partition the hard drive with partitions that cover the whole hard drive? If you have partitions or one large partition that already is the size of the whole hard drive and the problems only arise during a format, then I would think there may be bad sectors on the disk that probably signals a failing or failed hard drive. Try chkdsk from the command line to check the physical status of the drive.