Q: My Windows 10 PC keeps telling me that I'm nearly out of storage space on my Seagate 1-terabyte Expansion Portable Hard Drive. But when I look at the external drive's content menu, I see that it's nowhere near full. What's wrong?
Jeffrey Miller, Reading, Pa.
A: External hard drives frequently come with electronic partitions that subdivide the disk into smaller segments. Windows 10 apparently is seeing only one of those segments, which is why it erroneously believes the disk is nearly full.
In a small business, external hard drive partitions would allow backups from different computers to be kept separate. But for a home user, the partition isn't useful. For example, when the disk segment you are using is full, you would need to switch to another segment to store more data.
The solution is to reformat the drive and, in the process, erase the partitions. That will allow Windows 10 to see all of the disk's storage space at once.
But reformatting will wipe the external hard drive clean, so you will first need to store its data in a different place — on your PC, some CDs, some flash drives or another external drive.
Once that's done, see tinyurl.com/bwpyel7 for directions on how to erase the external drive's partitions. You can then reformat the disk in the NTFS (New Technology File System) format that Windows 10 uses (see tinyurl.com/oyepq2o).
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