usb hard drive formatting/capacity issue

Dear all,

I decided to format my usb drive because some files created on windows had been locked at it was impossible to get rid of them.
I transfered all my data on another hard drive and started the disk utility to format my drive.
However, my drive being 500GB it only shows 371GB after formating. I guess there around 200GB that have "disappeared". One of the things I know I did is that I deleted some files (that could well have amounted to those 200) and did not bother emptying the bin since I was going to format it. Now that it is formated, impossible to go back to the bin and delete it.

Anyway to COMPLETELY erase the whole disk? It would be too bad, because I need more than those 371 to put all my files back which would mean that I'd have to buy a new drive...

I hope you can help.

Bastien

It probably was not necessary to format the drive in the first place - just to get rid of locked files. Files appear locked when a drive has been formatted to NTFS because of permissions and the fact that OS X can only read but not write to NTFS without a third party utility. But you can work around that from OS X. In any event, it's too late for that.....

You need to erase the entire drive from Disk Utility - first making sure that all the partitions on it have been removed. Then format the drive as HFS + or FAT-32 (MS DOS), your choice. That will get back the original capacity of the drive.

Regards.