External Hard Drive Trouble

[FLWBStrainman]

I know this is not directly related to Trainz, but I don't know where else to go to. I recently bought a 500 GB external hard drive. After some troubleshooting, I got it to work. I have 64-bit Vista Ultimate, by the way. I used Windows Back-up and Restore Center to back up the C-Drive, which is 232 GB. It took nearly 2.5 hours, and I got a message that it had finished successfully. However, when I checked the size of the drive, it said only about 10 GB's had been used up. What could've happened to the other 222 GB's?

 

[Gandalf0444]

I know this is not directly related to Trainz, but I don't know where else to go to. I recently bought a 500 GB external hard drive. After some troubleshooting, I got it to work. I have 64-bit Vista Ultimate, by the way. I used Windows Back-up and Restore Center to back up the C-Drive, which is 232 GB. It took nearly 2.5 hours, and I got a message that it had finished successfully. However, when I checked the size of the drive, it said only about 10 GB's had been used up. What could've happened to the other 222 GB's?

Most if not all external hard drives,come formatted as FAT32 which means it only accepts files or chunks there of of roughly 10gigs. So the best way would be to reformat it into NTFS(what the other internal drives are formatted as) and these will allow you to put any size file on there. I did this myself with my 1TB external drive,it is very easy and takes about 10 minutes to do. Just make sure you havn't put anything on the drive or it will be wipped clean when you reformat.
Edit: Sorry I am unsure about how to go about doing this on Vista,if it were XP I would have you covered

 

[Stagefright]

Very easy to do in Vista: Open Computer & right-click on the drive you want to format. Note: Be VERY careful & make sure you're at the correct drive. Select the 'format' option, then select NTFS from the drop-down labeled 'File System'. Give it a label & format.

 

[AussieNightcrawler]

Most if not all external hard drives,come formatted as FAT32 which means it only accepts files or chunks there of of roughly 10gigs. So the best way would be to reformat it into NTFS(what the other internal drives are formatted as) and these will allow you to put any size file on there. I did this myself with my 1TB external drive,it is very easy and takes about 10 minutes to do. Just make sure you havn't put anything on the drive or it will be wipped clean when you reformat.
Edit: Sorry I am unsure about how to go about doing this on Vista,if it were XP I would have you covered

I have 4 external hard drives, all mine came unformatted and no partitions, I had to set them up my self in Computer Management. But then, I brought the hard drive and the external case separately.


From memory, Windows does not back up everything, it only backs up what it sees as important, you have to do the rest.

 

[Winterpaw]

you may not have backed up everything, just what windows thought was important to its recovery. also, it may be compressed.

 

[stouthm]

I too have a 500gig external hard drive and I use Solways Plain Backup and it works great and it's free. The first time that you use it will take some time to backup everything but after that it will backup only new items.
Google Solways Plain Backup and you will probably get a newer version than what I have. I'm very satisfied with what I have. Might help with your problem.