How to make a locked hard drive with recovered data still usable?

[howyoubeen]

Not sure if it’s the right section. Recently I had to use a data recovery service. At the end of the operation I received this new hard drive (Seagate One Touch) with the recovered data. There is still space to use, but I don’t seem to be able to add any new data to it, as if it’s locked. Is formatting the only way to do that? Or there is some other old trick to avoid the purchase of a new hard drive?
Thanks

[Bruce]

all depends on how they did it and what they used.
being a professional recovery lab, I’m guessing you aren’t the first person they have dealt with trying to use all the space on the drive they supplied, so have set it up in such a way to not be able to update the data they recovered for you - by design.

firstly, make sure you have copied all that data onto another media, they I would perform a quick format on the Seagate and see if that helps.
next would be Disk Management and deleting the partitions.

but how much space are you trying to reclaim?
have you looked at prices for external drives recently - they are dirt cheap!

[howyoubeen]

all depends on how they did it and what they used.
being a professional recovery lab, I’m guessing you aren’t the first person they have dealt with trying to use all the space on the drive they supplied, so have set it up in such a way to not be able to update the data they recovered for you - by design.

firstly, make sure you have copied all that data onto another media, they I would perform a quick format on the Seagate and see if that helps.
next would be Disk Management and deleting the partitions.

but how much space are you trying to reclaim?
have you looked at prices for external drives recently - they are dirt cheap!

thank you for your advice!

[Bruce]

no worries, keep us updated on how you get on! (y)

[Bruce]

@howyoubeen - any progress?

[Bruce]

abandoned