3TB My Book only offering 800mb usable space

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for macOS
1

Hi there,

I have a 3tb My Book. I need to format it to FAT32 as it is to be used on a Fire TV box.

I started this process via Disk Utility and it failed on my Macbook Pro as “MediaKit reports not enough space on device for requested operation”. So I got help HERE

This worked perfectly and I am confident I did it right. I then went back to Disk Utility and formatted the drive to MS-DOS (FAT) which I believe (?) is correct. Sure enough the drive is displaying as USB External Physical Volume • MS-DOS (FAT32), but it also shows the used space as 2.2TB, leaving 800mb or so as free space. This information is replicated when I go to Finder and ‘Get info’. Prior to this, or when I format it back to ExFAT, the available space is 3TB.

Now I’m no expert, but I have done this before without issue. I’m don’t really understand erasing and partitioning, but I’m decent at following logical instructions.

What have I done wrong and how can I fix it?

Thanks in advance for anyone’s help

2

if the partition is lager than 32GB, the Windows Disk Management can only format it to NTFS. Thus, when you try to use it to format the 3TB hard drive, you will find the file system only show you “NTFS”