How to undo ESD-USB

Here I wrote an article about a common problem occurring with hard drives for a tech website.

Mistakes happen. When dealing with computers especially, they can happen a lot. We have all been faced with situations, staring down at our screens, that we have no idea how to resolve. Many Windows and even Mac users find external hard drives extremely useful to extend their device’s storage capacity. Typical hard drives usually have USB 2.0 interfaces that support data transfer rates of up to 480 Mbps. They run on NTFS file systems, which stands for "New Technology File System,” introduced by Microsoft.

Many users have mistakenly changed the file system within their hard drive when wanting to create Windows media creation tools. With a few clicks of your mouse, you may have accidentally just made your NTFS hard drive into an ESD-USB format. ESD stands for Electronic Software Delivery - it is a type of format for storage devices typically used to install Windows on a machine. That’s the format you’ll want to use if you’re installing Windows on a computer. However, if you accidentally convert a drive into ESD, it will format your entire drive and allocate a 32GB partition, which isn’t what you’re looking for if you want to use the drive as an external data storage solution.

You may be faced with the issue of seeing your external or internal hard drive displaying 32GB or 31GB if you are in Windows Explorer. You may also be unable to locate allocated partitions on an ESD-USB hard drive or external hard drive, or you may even be panicking right now, thinking you have lost everything on your drive. Don’t worry; we have provided a guide to undoing ESD-USB.

In this article, we will be going through a few easy steps to take to recover the situation. We will also be discussing the preventive measures you can take to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Method 1: Check Errors and Fix

Step 1: Connect an external hard drive to your device.

Step 2: See if it shows up in the Windows Disk Management window. If it doesn’t, click the action tab and select “Rescan disks.”

Step 3: Open the Command prompt as an Admin and enter the command: chkdsk X: /f while replacing the “X” character with the letter corresponding to your external hard drive (you’ll find this letter under the Windows Disk Management window).

Step 4: Press enter. This will allow your computer to go into the drive, check the errors, and fix them automatically.

Once you have followed these steps, take the time to check again if you can see your external hard drive’s full capacity, not just 32GB. If you can’t, that means we should be trying something else. So let’s talk about the next method.

Method 2: Create a New Volume

You’ve tried method number one, and it failed. You will need to create a new partition while still conserving the Windows restoration partition. A partition is a part of a storage device, like a hard disk drive or solid-state drive. It is considered as a separate volume by Windows, which makes it function like a separate device.

Make sure you have recovered your data before you attempt to create a new partition because this could lead to partial or total data loss.

Step 1: The first thing you need to do is to open the Windows Disk Management window.

Step 2: Then, right-click the unallocated disk space and click “New simple volume option.”

Step 3: Subsequently, you are going to choose the “Next” button and type the amount of MB you are going to use from unallocated disk space to create the new partition. We recommend entering the maximum disk space possible. Once that’s done, click “Next.”

Step 4: Now, you can choose any of the drive letters for the partition and click “Next.”

Step 5: You can now type in a volume cable.

Step 6: Enable the “perform a quick format” option.

These steps should have led you to go back to the original format of your hard drive. You will be able to use your hard drive as a storage space once again.

Method 3: Format an External Hard Drive

For this method of undoing ESD-USB, it is important that you recover your drive’s data first because it will erase the data stored when returning to the original format (NTFS).

Step 1: Open File Explorer on your Windows device.
Step 2: Locate the external hard drive.
Step 3: Right-click on the desired hard drive it and select the Format tab. Step 4: Set the file system to NTFS and the allocation unit size to 2048 bytes. Step 5: Select the "quick format" option.
Step 6: Click ‘Start,’ and watch as your hard drive reverts to an NTFS format!

How to Prevent Future ESD-USB Mistakes

Knowing how mistakes happen is a big part of making sure they don’t happen again. Hopefully, you now know the difference between ESD and USB, and you know what an NTFS format is. Understanding problems are the first step in resolving them! However, there are also concrete solutions to prevent future ESD-USB mistakes. Keep your device and data safe by encrypting or locking your hard drive with a password, which will prevent any false clicks.

This guide to locking a hard drive works for Windows 10, 8, and 7 users. Others can acquire reliable and easy-to-use programs that give the option to lock and encrypt hard drives. Hence, no one besides yourself will access your data without a password, which could be useful in many situations. This is how to enable BitLocker on a Windows 10, 8, and 7:

Step 1: Open your Windows computer’s Control Panel and select "BitLocker Drive Encryption.”

Step 2: Locate and expand the drive or external hard drive you wish to lock, and select the "Turn on BitLocker" option.

Step 3: Set a password to lock the selected hard drive or external hard drive. Step 4: Click “next” to proceed.

Step 5: Select a way you want to save your password to your Microsoft account, to a USB drive, to a file or print the recovery key and click "Next" to confirm.

Step 6: Choose which part(s) of your drive you would like to encrypt and click "Next" to continue.

Step 7: Choose which encryption mode to use and click "Next" to continue. Step 8: Click "Start encrypting" and wait for the process to finish.