All of your work and files are stored on the hard drive. Nowadays, all of us maintain a digital copy of all our essential documents. To save those files more of your system space may be required. Also, we are using more applications that may require enormous storage space. For accumulating all these files, we may require more drive space. You must optimize the hard drive space to restore its actual capacity. Let’s learn how we can recover lost space from the hard drive.
Examine the Restore Hard Drive for Problems
We’ll look at a typical strategy for finding and repairing errors that work for both internal and external drives when you need to restore the disk’s original capacity and recover lost disk space. Windows includes a configured method for detecting and recovering hard disks, that can be utilized to inspect storage systems and resolve any faults that are discovered.
Step 1: Open the Windows File Explorer by clicking twice the normal desktop icon.
Step 2: Locate and right-click on the disk that needs to be tested for faults in the File Explorer window.
Step 3: Out of the dialogue box that displays, click Properties.
Step 4: Go to the Tools section in the disk properties box which appears.
Step 5: Click on the Check button under the Error Checking section, and then click on the Ok button.
Perform Hard Disk Quick Format
Sometimes your disk drivers may get cluttered with unnecessary files. You can effectively recover your system space by formatting it. The good part is that you can quickly understand how to recover hard disk storage using this approach by performing these simple steps:
Step 1: Navigate to This PC in Windows Explorer.
Step 2: Now, right-click the hard drive symbol.
Step 3: Select “Format” using the contextual option.
Step 4: You can modify the drive’s format scheme or pick a preferred file system. NTFS is the new file system in most of the recent hard drives.
Step 5: Finally, click on the “Format” option and allow your hard disk to be reassigned.
Use Disk Management Tool
The Disk Management utility can help you in restoring your drive space. Let us now study how to use this utility.
Step 1: Start the Disk Management utility from the Run tab. Type diskmgmt.msc and hit Enter.
Step 2: When the Disk Management programme is started, choose the partition and right-click.
Step 3: After selecting the partition, you may right-click the hard drive icon and select Format instead. Ensure you do not have any important data on the selected partition or have already taken a backup of the data on an external drive. This step will wipe out all the data on the drive.
Step 4: This will launch a specialized dialogue where you may pick a suitable file system for the disk.
Step 5: You may format the entire disk by following the wizard and entering the necessary information.
Using Diskpart Application
If you are good at using the Command Prompt app, you can use the Diskpart utility to fix and restore your hard disk capacity. Use your command prompt to access the diskpart application.
Step 1: As an administrator, launch the Command Prompt console. Search CMD in the search bar and click on the ‘Run as Administrator’ option.
Step 2: To launch the Disk Partition utility, execute the diskpart command in the Command Prompt. You can also press Win + R to access the Run command prompt, type diskpart and hit the Enter key. This will take you directly to the command prompt Disk Partition utility.
Step 3: Enter “List disk” to receive a list of all the disk partitions.
Step 4: Input the “select disk” command along with the disk number to select it.
Step 5: After selecting the disk, type and execute the “clean” command to wipe its storage. Remember, do not clear the active disk that has Windows installed on it.
Step 6: To make the primary partition on your drive, use the “create partition primary” command.
Step 7: Finally, you may use the “format” command to format the disk and its file system.
Please Note – To format a drive under the NTFS file system, for example, use the “format fs=ntfs” command.
Identify and Clear Out Duplicate Files
The above-discussed steps are all the manual methods for regaining your hard drive storage capacity. You can also consider removing the large video files, movies, backup files and other data that is consuming a lot of space. You can sort data according to file size and figure out what to keep or remove.
The above tweaks are a little time-consuming and may require more human intervention. Aside from the options listed above, we may also delete unnecessary duplicate or similar files that may occupy more of your drive space. A dedicated Duplicate File Fixer tool can help you to recover lost space from your hard drive.
Duplicate Files Fixer
The greatest duplicate file finder for free, Duplicate Files Fixer, will effortlessly aid you in removing similar files and recovering HDD capacity. With the software, you may effortlessly clean away a large amount of space. This ideal duplicate file finder and cleaner application is compatible with all the latest versions of Windows.
Duplicate Files Fixer Features
- Ability to organize files and extract additional storage space
- Capacity to detect, list out and pick duplicate files for deletion
- The Best Duplicate File Finder that is dependable and simple to use
- One-click duplicate finder to list out duplicate files, docs, music, photos, and videos
- Better efficiency to check internal/external hard disk storage for identical files
- Capable of classifying scan results in groups for easy selection
- Preview scan results before removing found duplicates
Bottom Line
Hard drives are your system’s most important hardware component since they determine your device’s storage capacity. Sometimes the actual storage capacity of the HDD may get reduced due to many reasons. We have addressed all the factors that may affect the storage capacity of the hard drive and tweaks for HDD capacity restoration. Use this blog to enjoy the enhanced storage capacity of your HDD.
