External Hard Disk is not empty but files are not being displayed

external hard drivehard driventfs

My external hard disk has data on it. When I right click and see properties it says has 189GB occupied, but I am unable to see any files in it. It is of NTFS format. Can anybody tell me what's wrong with it

Best Answer

Try mounting the drive with a linux livecd with NTFS 3G and see if the files are visible. If so, copy out the data, then reformat - in my experience, its worked both times i have encountered this situation

If that fails, try testdisc to see if you can recover the drive.

Related Solutions

Windows – Format an external hard disk to FAT32, only option showing is NTFS

Try doing it via the command prompt. Go to Start -> Execute: cmd -> Enter

Execute the following:

 format (Drive letter): /FS:FAT32

You don’t need to use cmd prompt at all sometimes. But the following way might actually take twice as long or not at all as the above example but you could use it if you are uncomfortable using cmd prompt.

Format the disk as NTFS using first. Once this is complete you can then right-click the partition and choose Format. In File System you can then select FAT32 from the drop down.

The reason you can't do it directly is because Windows has this limited through the GUI.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#FAT32

The Windows 2000/XP installation program and filesystem creation tool imposes a limitation of 32 GiB [18]. However, both systems can read and write to FAT32 file systems of any size. This limitation is by design and according to Microsoft was imposed because many tasks on a very large FAT32 file system become slow and inefficient.

...

The maximum possible size for a file on a FAT32 volume is 4 GiB minus 1 byte (232−1 bytes). Video applications, large databases, and some other software easily exceed this limit. Larger files require another formatting type such as NTFS.

Newly formatted (NTFS) external hard drive already has ‘Used space’. What determines the used space’s amount? Is it correlated to the HD’s capacity

tl;dr: This is space reserved for metadata storage.

This article about NTFS technical side will give you some more details, but most of this space is taken by the Master File Table. (Some space is also used for the boot sectors, and so on.)

What explains a good part of the "bloated" metadata in NTFS compared to, say, FAT32 is the need to store Access Control Lists - although there are more things in there.

How much space is used by the MFT?

There are 4 settings available when you format a hard disk in NTFS:

Setting 1 reserves approximately 12.5 % of the volume. (Default)
Setting 2 reserves approximately 25 %.
Setting 3 reserves approximately 37.5 %.
Setting 4 reserves approximately 50 %.

This is because the MFT size is proportional to your number of files. A standard (12.5 %) MFT size will be enough to provide metadata space for all your files if you fill the rest of your disk with 8 KB files. Of course, since some files are going to be much bigger, this is an average.

If you store a large number of smaller files to your disk, there won't be enough space to accommodate all their metadata in the reserved MFT space. This is not fatal, as a new MFT cluster will simply be created elsewhere. However, it will cause MFT data fragmentation, which is bad, as in, can cause severe performance degradation in some cases.