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dronethought

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External Seagate Drive was formatted as NTFS now showing exfat...

Hello,
I have two Seagate external drives. Both 3 TB. All of a sudden..I see 2 TBavailable or allocated and fomatted as NFTS and almost 1 TB unallocated and I cannot do anything to the drive. When I try to format the entire drive, I see exfat as my only option. I am trying to format the external usb drive from a 2003 r2 server. I have not seen this before. When I try to format the entire drive, I get "internal error."??
Thanks,
J
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Robert Retzer
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Did you or someone else plug the drive into a mac computer, if you did the mac may have irreversibly formatted the drive to exfat. This would have been done without warning, if you tried to access the NTFS on the mac. I think the only way to make the drive usable now would be to delete all the partitions and then format them as ntfs.
you can use the triel version of Bootit-BM to correct this (delete and reformat partitions)
download it, and make the cd
boot from the CD - do NOT install it on the drive/hit cancel
select partition work, and delete all partitions - then format as required
www.terabyteunlimited.com/
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noxcho
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You say external,are we talking usb?
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dronethought

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Very strange  behavior. The drives were not converted to GPT...Basically I backed up 3 tb of data one day. The drive is disconnected from the server. The next day I connect the USB drive I  usually format the drive instead of erasing the contents. Faster. I right click the drive and it gives me exfat at the only alternative and it shows something like 1.90TB to be formatted. What happened to the other terabyte? The drive was not connected to a Mac. This is the second drive to do this.  Luckily the data backed up fit on the first 2tb of the drive. GPT sounds familiar.  When I go into Drive Management I see the drive split up into two. The last terabyte cannot be deleted, formated, or anything.  I can format the first 2tb without issue. I will make the drives GPT...I did not know that my server 2003 did not see drives bigger than 2tb but when I connect a 4tb drive to the server, all the data is there. So the server does recognize the drive. But this new 4tb drive has NOT been reformatted again. I think once I reformat the new drive, I will have the same issue. I will connect the drive to a Windows 7 pc. Thank you.

J
Windows 8 sees the drive correctly...
Means that your Windows 2003 is 32 bit. Otherwise it would identify the whole size.