Hard Drive Issues – lost space on TB drive
I am catching up on some hard drive issues last week. I have a Toshiba 8 TB drive that I bought brand new in 2021. Around the same time, I noticed that my OWC SoftRAID software included a drive test. I decided to try it out on my new drive before it had any data on it. I am not used to having 8TB drives, so I was worried about loosing data.
THE PROBLEM
After the test, there was no error message, but the drive became unusable, it was not readable or formattable on any operating system I had Mac or Windows. I contacted the vendor to find out that you have to be careful buying computer parts from NewEgg. This drive was sold to me by a store hosted on the NewEgg site, but it was not NewEgg, similar to the method used by Amazon. Ok, a learning experience for me, the vendor said there was no warrantee provided.
ADVICE
Contact the drive manufacturer immediately. I did not think about contacting the drive manufacturer after the vendor told me no warrantee. This is what I advise you to do, if you bought a new drive there is a manufacturer’s warrantee. I had a very prompt reply from Toshiba and the warrantee from the manufacturer on my drive was 3 years. If I had contacted them right away, I could probably had the drive replaced. However, I did not know this at the time and it had expired.
I put the drive back in the box and life happened. Fast forward to 2026, I found the drive box and I really need the TB space. I decided to try again. After trying CLI on Windows and Mac to erase the drive, I was able to format a small section of just over 1 GB in Mac.
Checking on Reddit for similar issues, I found a thread where someone had the same problem.
https://www.reddit.com/r/computer/comments/1c4r8bh/formatted_a_4_tb_drive_and_now_it_only_shows_164/
Something was blocking other people’s drives too. I talked to a fellow Tech and he told me to contact the manufacturer. If that didn’t work, try Linux to fully erase the drive.
THE SOLUTION
I was not going to set up a Linux system to deal with one drive, so I looked for some help.
Lucky for me, I found Matthew Leung, locally in Vancouver, who was able to erase the drive in Linux and reformat in ExFat for me as I requested. I recommend his company Leung Tech because he helped me recover a drive very quickly at a reasonable cost.
If you have a large TB drive that is somehow being blocked from using the full capacity, then the solution is to erase it in Linux and reformat it in the format you want. I do not know what was blocking this drive yet, but Matthew was able to fix it.