How to restore my external hard drive to full capacity after formatting it to MS-DOS?
Hello,
I had several external hard drives that worked perfectly in Windows, but they are only readable on my Mac (not editable). Therefore, I wanted to erase and reformat them to MS-DOS (FAT) so I can work (them) in both Windows and Mac OS. But, once I do this on my 8 TB Seagate, it is indicated that 6.6 TB out of the actual 8 TB is used (even though there is nothing in the hard drive). Moreover, I found this comment from Kappy (showed below) at the beginning of this year which I followed exactly, except that I set the format type to MS-DOS (FAT32). Nevertheless, 3/4 of the space in my external hard drive is filled with I do not know what (gosh space?, please anyone correct my ignorance).
Please, any one that knows any method to get full capacity of an external hard drive while keeping the MS-DOS format (like in my case) let me know!
Thank you in advance!!!!
KappyJan 20, 2018 3:11 PM in response to BAL-II
Jan 20, 2018 3:11 PM Re: How to reformat a usb drive to its full capacityin response to BAL-II
The formatted capacity of an advertised 256GB drive is around 240GBs. To partition and format the flash drive on your Mac is as follows:
Drive Partition and Format - El Capitan or Later
- Open Disk Utility in the Utilities' folder.
- After Disk Utility loads select the drive (out-dented entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the side list.
- Click on the Erase tab in the Disk Utility toolbar. A panel should drop down.
- In the drop down panel set the partition scheme to GUID. Set the Format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.)
- Click on the Apply button and click on the Done button when it is activated.
- Quit Disk Utility.
MacBook Air, macOS High Sierra (10.13.4), null