[Solved] Hard Drive/External Hard Drive Showing Half Capacity

A Complete Solution to Restore Full Capacity of Hard Drive or External Hard Drive:

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The solution provided addresses this issue and easily recovers your storage device to its full capacity.

• 1TB HDD shows as 500GB only
• 500GB hard drive showing only 130GB space
• 1TB hard disk showing only 127GB
• External hard drive showing only 32GB
• Hard drive showing only 4GB
• 4TB hard drive showing as 2TB

If you're also struggling with a similar issue and want to make the most out of your HDD, SSD, or external hard drive space, choose the appropriate solution and follow the steps to fix it right now.

Reasons for Hard Drive Showing Half or Partial Capacity

Hard disk drives (like HDD/SSD) play a significant role in reading and writing data. The bigger the better. Thus, we don't have to worry about receiving low disk space warnings when installing programs, games, or saving a large number of documents, movies, music, and more during daily computer use.

Yet many users find that their 1TB, 2TB, or 4TB drives have only half as much user storage, or less. What gives? Why doesn't the drive show the correct capacity?

Quite a few users usually encounter the issue of incorrect disk size displayed. This problem might be caused by the following reasons:

• Virus or malware infection
• Hard drive, SSD, or external drive formatted with MBR
• Files are hidden
• Partition deleted or lost, showing as unallocated

Restore data before fixing the HDD showing half capacity issue

Applies to: Scans and recovers all existing available data on a hard drive, SSD, or external drive on your Windows PC that shows up as half full or with only partial space.

If you have valuable data saved on your hard drive, SSD, or external hard drive that's showing only half or some portion of the space, the first thing you should do is to scan and recover all important data to another secure device. To restore your files, download and install the Data Recovery Wizard tool.

It is a hard drive data recovery software specifically designed to recover data from all kinds of storage devices that have been deleted, formatted, or infected by viruses, regardless of whether the capacity shows half, partial, or full.

Video tutorial on External Hard Drive Data Recovery

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Step-by-step guide:

Step 1: Select and scan the lost partition

Start the Data Recovery Wizard, select "Lost Partition," and then click "Scan" to search for all lost data. If you have multiple lost partitions, you can identify them by their size.

Note: Since the Windows system does not support the Linux file system, Ext2 or Ext3 partitions will be identified as unallocated space with no drive letter in this software. If you want to recover data from an Ext2/Ext3 partition, follow these steps.

Step 2: Filter the scan results

Since there will be many files to scan, you can filter them quickly by file type, such as Images, Videos, Documents, Audio, and Others. If you remember the name of the file, you can also search for it directly in the search bar at the top-right corner.

Step 3: Preview and recover data from the lost partition

Before recovery, you can preview the files to make sure that they are the data you need. Select all the required files and click “Recover” to restore them.

6 Ways to Fix a Hard Drive Showing Half or Partial Capacity and Restore Its Full Size

Knowing the causes, you might feel relieved, because we're also going to share the solutions.

Method 1: Remove Virus Causing Incorrect Hard Drive Size

Applies to: Solving HDD/SSD or external hard drive not showing full capacity issue due to virus infection.

When your hard drive gets infected by a virus or malware that takes up some of its storage space, it may show that only half or some portion of its capacity is available. You can keep your hard drive clean and secure by running an antivirus.

Step 1: Check for virus or malware infections

If you have an antivirus program installed, run a scan with it now. If not, download and install one of the free options like Avast or AVG.

Step 2. Connect the problematic hard drive, SSD, or external drive to your computer correctly.

Step 3: Run an antivirus scan on your device to detect and remove any existing viruses and malware.

Users without this software can also refer to this link for instructions on how to remove viruses using Command Prompt in Windows 10/8.1/8/7.

Method 2: Convert MBR to GPT to Get Full Capacity of Large HDD/SSD Back

Applies to: Solve the issue that large hard drive, SSD or external hard drive only shows half or partial capacity due to MBR limitation.

Another reason might be due to the limitation of the MBR partition style, which prevents the disk from displaying its full capacity. We know that MBR is only applicable to disks no larger than 2 TB and allows a maximum of 4 partitions to be created.

If you have a particularly large drive – one larger than 2 TB that was initialized in MBR style – you'll find that you can only access 2 TB of its capacity. To take advantage of the invisible remainder, you'll need to convert from MBR to GPT.

AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional is the perfect choice to convert MBR to GPT and GPT to MBR disk, which is super easy to use and guarantees zero data loss during the conversion.

Step 1: Download and install AOMEI Partition Assistant on your computer.

Step 2: Launch AOMEI Partition Assistant, select “Convert MBR to GPT Disk” and then click “Next” to proceed.

Convert MBR to GPT - 1

3. Select the MBR disk that you want to convert to GPT and click "Convert" to start the conversion.

Once the MBR to GPT partition conversion process is finished, you'll have the full size of your HDD, SSD, or external hard drive at your disposal again.

Method 3: Create a new volume to use unallocated space on your disk

Applies to: Use unallocated space on hard drive or SSD which shows as half or partial size.

Sometimes, the hard drive shows half the size because half of it is unallocated. You can create a new Simple Volume on the disk to take advantage of the remaining half or portion of unused space:

Step 1. Press Windows + R keys simultaneously on Windows 10/8.1/8/7 to open the Run box, type diskmgmt.msc, and hit Enter.

Step 2. Check in the disk mapping if the hard drive partition is shown as "Unallocated."

If there is, you can create a new simple volume in the unallocated space by following these steps.

Step 3. Right-click on the unallocated space and select "New Simple Volume".

Create a new simple volume in the unallocated space on the hard disk.

Step 4: Assign a new drive letter, file system, and size to the new volume.

Step 5: Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the process.

If you need to create more partitions using unallocated space, repeat this process until you've used all the unallocated space on your target disk. Afterwards, you'll be able to see the full capacity and make the most out of your disk space again.

Method 4: Show Hidden Partitions to Solve Disk Size Display Errors

Applies to: Solve the issue of wrong hard drive or SSD capacity shown in Windows 10/8/7 due to hidden partitions.

When half of your disk space is hidden somewhere, or you have partitions with some free space hiding on your computer's disk, you might not see the full capacity in the Windows File Explorer.

To show or hide hidden partitions on your computer, follow these steps:

Step 1: Make sure the target disk is properly connected to your computer and then open "Disk Management".

Step 2: Right-click the “New Volume” without a drive letter and select “Change Drive Letter and Paths.”

Step 3. Click on “Assign the following drive letter” to give the partition a new drive letter so it's visible in Windows File Explorer.

For example, you can assign the drive letter "F" to the hidden partition, and then click OK.

After that, you can restart your computer, and when you open File Explorer again, you should be able to view and access any other hidden or partially hidden partitions on the disk.

Method 5: Add Unallocated Space to Adjacent or Non-Adjacent Partition

Applies to: Maximizes unused space on a hard drive or external hard drive by adding unallocated space to an adjacent or nonadjacent partition.

When you have unallocated space on your disk or external hard drive, you may also not be able to see its full capacity on your computer. Only half or a portion of it might show.

At this point, you may want to try creating a new simple volume as in Method 3, or attempt the following trick to add the unallocated space to an existing partition, either contiguous or non-contiguous.

#1. Add unallocated space to an adjacent partition

If the unallocated space is located after an existing partition, you can use Disk Management to add the unallocated space to the adjacent partition and extend it:

Step 1: Open Disk Management on your computer and locate the unallocated space.

2. Right-click on the adjacent partition that you want to extend, then select "Extend Volume" to continue.

Step 3: Specify the new size for your target partition and click “Next” to continue.

Resize partitions in Windows 7 with Disk Management

Step 4. Click “Finish” to conclude the process.

#2. Add unallocated space to a nonadjacent partition

If you want to add unallocated space to a non-contiguous partition, you can use Partition Master and its Resize/Move feature.

It lets you move unallocated space next to the target partition freely and resize it easily:

Method 6: Perform a partition recovery and restore full disk capacity

Applies to: Repair SSD showing only half the space after partition deletion or loss.

When some of the partitions on your disk are deleted or lost, you might not be able to see its full capacity, and only a portion of the storage space will be visible on your Windows PC.

To get back all the capacity on the disk without losing any data, you can try to recover data with Data Recovery Wizard first and then create a new partition on the unallocated space as shown in Method 3. Alternatively, you can run a reliable partition recovery tool to get back all lost, deleted, or even hidden data-containing partitions in one go.

Partition Recovery tool helps you retrieve the entire lost, deleted or hidden partition along with the data on it, as if it was never lost.

Step 1: Run the Partition Recovery tool on your computer.

Select the disk or device where the lost partition is located, and click "Scan" to proceed.

Step 2: Wait for the scanning process to finish.

Allow the program to scan the selected disk and find the lost partition.

Step 3: Preview and recover the lost partition.

Double-click the partition labeled "Lost" with a recovery status of "Good."

Preview the contents of the lost partition. Click "OK," then click "Start" to begin recovering the lost partition.

Step 4: Click "Resume Now" to complete the partition recovery process.

Note: If the program warns you about a conflict, first back up the listed partition containing important data to an external hard drive. Then proceed with the final step to recover your lost partition.

Conclusions

This page explains why your computer's hard drive, SSD, or external hard drive shows only half or less of its total capacity. Don't worry if you encounter issues like a 1TB hard drive showing 500GB, a 2TB external drive showing 127GB, or a 500GB SSD showing only 32GB on your computer.

Firstly, you can use a reliable data recovery tool like tools Data Recovery Wizard to scan and recover your valuable data from the invisible partition space. Then, you can easily restore half or other partition space on your hard drive using any of the 6 provided methods. These methods include removing viruses, converting the disk from MBR to GPT, recovering deleted partitions, showing hidden partitions, creating a new volume on unallocated space, or adding unallocated space to an existing partition.

Always keep in mind that, no matter how well you optimize your hard drive space, creating regular backups of your valuable data and running antivirus software to keep your device clean and secure are the two most important things.