I bought a 500GB external last year and have been using it for time machine. Recently I added a bunch of movies to it to free up space on my MBP so i deleted all the time machine backups and stopped using it for that. I then looked at the info of the drive and noted that it says the capacity is only 399 GB. Now I know that capacity is always a bit lower than what is advertised, but also know that when I bought the drive capacity was at least 460-465. Any ideas on how to fix this, or more specifically how to fix it without deleting everything on the HD? Cause I have no place to put over 100 gigs of movies!
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External Hard Drive capacity issue
- Thread starter jamminph88
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Unless you have another HD, large flash drive, or online hosting service, etc, then no.
You could split some of it up and put some on the Mac's internal HD, but the rest you'd have to put onto a DATA dvd disc, reformat, and then replace. Not ideal, but not that bad either, as you'd have a semi-permanent archive on the DVDs leftover. Just be sure to reinstall any drivers off of the DVD that came with the external HD, or download them from the company's website, and DO NOT REFORMAT TO NTSC, you want to keep it as FAT32.
You could split some of it up and put some on the Mac's internal HD, but the rest you'd have to put onto a DATA dvd disc, reformat, and then replace. Not ideal, but not that bad either, as you'd have a semi-permanent archive on the DVDs leftover. Just be sure to reinstall any drivers off of the DVD that came with the external HD, or download them from the company's website, and DO NOT REFORMAT TO NTSC, you want to keep it as FAT32.
Just for clarity, the OP's hard drive is not formatted to FAT32 right now since they have been running Time Machine which will not work on a PC FAT32 formatted drive- it will only work on a Mac format (Mac OS Extended). Additionally the alternate PC format is NTFS, not the video format NTSC.
It's true, I have too many video-editing acronyms running around in my head all the time, they take over from time to time, NTFS is correct. Haven't ever used a time machine, so I don't really know their specifics. I stand by the defragment -> reformat solution though.