Unallocated space and 0-byte size files

My neighbor has a 4 TB Western Digital Easy Store drive that only shows 32 GB in FAT 32 format on the drive in Disk Manager on Windows 10. The total space showing up is equivalent to about the 4 TB. There are 3 other partitions that are showing as unallocated. I ran one of the recovery utilities that was found on Hiren’s latest boot CD. It recovered a great deal of files, however, the majority of them were 0 bytes. I restored the data to my internal drive to make sure nothing else was written to the external Western Digital drive. Is it possible that these 3 partitions on this drive somehow converted to an unallocated format? Is it possible that he never formatted them all properly to utilize the whole drive? Any recommendations on how to deal with the 0-byte file size? I am hoping that in this day of age, purchasing software to fix this issue is not a requirement. I know someone has found a solution for this somewhere out there and I am willing to give it a try. Oddly enough, some of the files were PDFs and some of these files can be viewed properly from the restored directory on my internal drive. Others cannot.

Hello ssandheinrich,

To use the complete storage capacity, you can check after erasing the drive in NTFS file format to use Easystore drive on Windows, then allocate or create partitions as per the requirement.

Note: It’s a data destructive process and backup of important data files before going to format is recommended.