1 TB USB shrinks to 36Gb !

mrtom

So time to create recovery media for my 8.1 Acer. Connect my new unused 1 TB USB drive, format requested, default FAT 32 pops up and I quick format and proceed with the Acer “Create factory default back up”. When the process finishes I note my USB drive which was labelled “Intenso” is now called “Recovery” and the 1TB drive now detects capicity of just 36Gb.
Tech at Harvey Norman told me that the drive when used as recovery media means that the drive becomes a one purpose drive and cannot be used for anything else and using FAT 32 caused the shrinkage. He did however replace the drive on the spot. Is he correct?

mordeith

mrtom wrote: »

So time to create recovery media for my 8.1 Acer. Connect my new unused 1 TB USB drive, format requested, default FAT 32 pops up and I quick format and proceed with the Acer “Create factory default back up”. When the process finishes I note my USB drive which was labelled “Intenso” is now called “Recovery” and the 1TB drive now detects capicity of just 36Gb.
Tech at Harvey Norman told me that the drive when used as recovery media means that the drive becomes a one purpose drive and cannot be used for anything else and using FAT 32 caused the shrinkage. He did however replace the drive on the spot. Is he correct?

You probably should have partitioned the drive first and allocated whatever space you needed for the recovery partition. Seems odd that they replaced the drive though. It could just have been reformatted I would have thought.

BoB_BoT

It could be a restriction on Fat32 volume size that's giving the problem. How big is the backup, would it fit on a flash drive that you could have for that sole purpose. You can format volumes to be larger than 32GB in Fat32, but you need to set it manually. It was likely that the imaging/restore program set the volume size on the drive.

Alternatively, you could load up the disk manager (under computer management) and see if the external hard disk has an unformatted partition that you could then format yourself to get use out of the rest of the drive.

brianwalshcork

Creating a 2nd partition on an external drive in windows isn't straightforward - I had something similar to the op - created a win8 USB boot disk on a USB memory stick and thought I could "easily" use the remaining disk space - but it wasn't possible without kludge a - I just gave up an never followed up on it to see if it was possible to get it working.

mrtom

brianwalshcork wrote: »

Creating a 2nd partition on an external drive in windows isn't straightforward - I had something similar to the op - created a win8 USB boot disk on a USB memory stick and thought I could "easily" use the remaining disk space - but it wasn't possible without kludge a - I just gave up an never followed up on it to see if it was possible to get it working.

Got all of that up to " kludge ", typo?

syklops

mrtom wrote: »

So time to create recovery media for my 8.1 Acer. Connect my new unused 1 TB USB drive, format requested, default FAT 32 pops up and I quick format and proceed with the Acer “Create factory default back up”. When the process finishes I note my USB drive which was labelled “Intenso” is now called “Recovery” and the 1TB drive now detects capicity of just 36Gb.
Tech at Harvey Norman told me that the drive when used as recovery media means that the drive becomes a one purpose drive and cannot be used for anything else and using FAT 32 caused the shrinkage. He did however replace the drive on the spot. Is he correct?

He is not correct in that there was no need to replace the drive. Fat32 does not support the creation of partitions larger than 32GB using the built in formatting tool in Windows. Formatting the drive in FAT32 means only the first 32(ish) GB show up.

If you format the drive using NTFS, you will be able to create one partition 1TB in size. The Max size for NTFS is actually 2TB, but there are ways round it, not to mention a myriad of other filesystems you can use.

mrtom

Thanks for the refresher course, knowledge decay is my excuse!
So now I'v connected the new drive and see image "drive detection". Interesting, of course no drive letter and its FAT32 out of the box.
So next image on add drive letter, unsure which option to choose. I wish to convert FAT32 to NTFC, more suitable for large media files, but am unsure of the steps. Previous new drives were plug & play.

brianwalshcork

mrtom wrote: »

Got all of that up to " kludge ", typo?

Nope, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kludge

I think I would have had to boot from a Linux live cd and use a third party tool as windows just won't create partitions on a a USB dusk with the native tools

mordeith

mrtom wrote: »

Thanks for the refresher course, knowledge decay is my excuse!
So now I'v connected the new drive and see image "drive detection". Interesting, of course no drive letter and its FAT32 out of the box.
So next image on add drive letter, unsure which option to choose. I wish to convert FAT32 to NTFC, more suitable for large media files, but am unsure of the steps. Previous new drives were plug & play.

You can assign the new drive any letter that's not currently in use.

After that you can right click and format to NTFS

mrtom

mordeith wrote: »

You can assign the new drive any letter that's not currently in use.

After that you can right click and format to NTFS

Thanks, all sorted now re the drive, however I'm less sure now about what exactly "Create Factory Default back up" means. No mention of bootable I see.

mordeith

mrtom wrote: »

Thanks, all sorted now re the drive, however I'm less sure now about what exactly "Create Factory Default back up" means. No mention of bootable I see.

I'm guessing it's a backup of the recovery partition on the laptop but I could be wrong.