Missing 256 GB of space

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

I have a MyBook WD5000 external drive. My computers are only showing that it has 244 GB of free space, when this is a 500 GB hard drive. I had two computers backed up on it at some point, but when I went to access the info, one of the files was gone and so was all of the space with it!

It was not partitioned and I even formatted the whole thing. Still only shows 244 GB free space, and total capacity. Anyone have any ideas?

2

1.  What OS?

2.  What partition and format is drive in?

3

The OS doesn’t matter, as I tried it on a Windows XP 32 bit, Windows Vista 64bit, and Windows 7 64 bit. The drive is not partitioned. It should be a stand alone drive with 500GB capacity (understanding that not all 500GB are accessible.)

The drive just shows that about 256 GB is not available, not there. I went in to manage drives, and it shows that all of my drives are healthy. The only drive partitioned in the primary drive, with the recovery section.

And the drive is formatted NTFS