Why is my 500GB Maxtor HD showing up as 7GB?

Have you tried deleting the partition, making a new one and then reformatting?

Not sure with MACs but I’m thinking you need to create at least one partition.

Your computer probably created one partition of 7GB on your disk and left the rest unpartitioned, either on your command or of its own accord. You can either create a new partition including the remaining ±493GB, or delete the 7GB one and make the whole disk one partition.
Perhaps you can even enlarge the 7GB partition instead of deleting it, if Mac software allows that. But I’d wager you can’t.

I don’t know how Macs normally behave with regard to this sort of thing (I didn’t even know you can mod a Mac), but this is my guess.

What version of software are you installing?

Can you do me a favor? Go to Applications/Utilities/Terminal and run diskutil list

It should look something like this:

Last login: Wed Oct 21 18:02:58 on ttys000
john-powells-imac52:~ johnryanpowell$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *160.0 GB disk0
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Untitled 159.7 GB disk0s2
john-powells-imac52:~ johnryanpowell$

Can you post the output of running that command.

Oooh, it’s so exciting when the ruffled drawers come off and there is UNIX underneath.

Sorry all, thanks much for responding. After plugging it into many a computer, and running many utilities it refused to acknowledge anything more than the 7GB that were there. (The nice little partition GUI showed one partition taking up the whole of the hardrive of 7GB)

Then I realized I hadn’t actually unplugged the drive from the power strip and let it power down. Sure enough upon plugging it in all of a sudden it was a 500GB drive with small sliver of a 7GB partition.

Ahh the great power of “Have you tried unplugging it?”

Thanks again all.

Still curious how/why the drive would run itself in a way that made over 400GB of itself completely hidden?

a lot of earlier (and even not so early) unix based Os’s sometimes had trouble swalowing partitions larger than 7 gigs. XP had the same peoblem before a patch. Some engineer somewhere thought ‘heck, they’ll never ger that big’ and encoded a mess-o-BIOS chips that way. You gotta kind of rub their nose in it a sec before thry figure out the drive is a lot bigger than 7.

I remember it got to the point we had to use ‘Partition Magic” to force a single large partition on some machines.

@majorrich Haha oh my god I’ve done that so many times!