Strange HDD Installation/Formatting Problem

[skyline889]

I recently purchased the 1tb Hitachi external for use as just an internal drive however, after I installed it, I noticed my boot drive went down from 17gb to 14.4gb on top of this I can't seem to re-format the 1tb drive. It was originally formatted in FAT32 and I would like to convert it to NTFS but every time I try I get the "Windows cannot format this drive. Quit any applications that may be using it in..." message. Does anyone know what's going on here?

 

[Dew]

Probably something accessing the drive and locking it. Remove the drive letter from disk management, restart, format using disk management, done.

Or the guaranteed solution, boot a Linux Live CD, use fdisk to remove the partition, reboot into windows and format the drive. (If you are not comfortable with linux, get Gparted)

 

[skyline889]

Thanks, I was able to re-format after forcing all programs to dislodge. I still don't know where the space went but I guess it doesn't matter now since I found out I need to switch to a larger HD anyways, didn't realize Orange Box needed 15gbs to install everything!