500GB hard drive showing around 32GB

[tdh10]

I have a Dell laptop that I got about a year ago with a Seagate ST9500420ASG 500GB 7200rmp hard drive in it. But it has always only showed - in the Bios and every other Windows 10, and other software that it is only 33GB capacity. I first assumed that this was because it was formatted as FAT or FAT32 but the drive is listed as NTFS.

I have dealt with it this way for a while, but gradually over the year, the windows updates have used up all the space on the disk and I have now had to delete literally everything else and still cannot get the latest huge Windows 10 update. So I was just about ready to give up and reformat the entire disk and switch to Linux - after everyone I asked provided either solutions that have been tried and failed, or were not applicable to my problem. Then the other day, after hours of searching, I found out about SEATOOLS for DOS and the "set capacity to native max" option. I already had SEATOOLS for windows installed and it - like everything else listed the drive as 33gb.

My question is - is it worth downloading, and trying this SEATOOLS for DOS application to try and fix this problem and if so - will it cause any or all loss of data (in my case that would mean my Windows 10 OS which I won't be able to get back).

Has anyone had the problem I am describing and had good results with this? I am here after having exhausted just about every other option and sure didn't want to have to create yet another username and password for yet another forum, but I thought it was worth a shot asking here.

[abolibibelot]

The first thing to do before attempting anything would be to backup the entire system partition (to a backup drive, or a bunch of DVDs if you don't have one available at the moment, with something like Acronis True Image or Macrium Reflect or any other reputed equivalent product – be sure to verify the backup afterwards) if you don't want to re-install everything from scratch.