sd cards shrinking from 16gb to 60mb?

[skywave]

Hi all,
I'm a brand new user of a Raspberry PI - matter of fact I'm still waiting to have it delivered - maybe tomorrow FEB07 - the newest PI2 B
Anyway - went to my local computer hw store today and bought a few different size SD sticks.
Back here at home I installed the Raspbian img on a 16GB SD and here comes my question:
After installing I go to properties and see to my horror that the 16GB has shrunk to about 60MB Using win32diskimager.
I was thinking I could have all that extra GB's for storage?
So what happened and what do I do about it? Can I/am I supposed to use an external storage like a 1TB WD USB drive?

edit a bit later:
alright I saw the video of how to download and copy/paste the NOOBS to a SD card, and that preserves the GB size of the card.
But if I wish to install another PI image and that one is only in an .img format - then I need to use win32diskimager, and that process alters the GB to MB.. How can I get around that?

[DougieLawson]

This is the #1 most frequently asked question on the forum.

It's normal.

Windows can't read 15.4GB of your data because it doesn't understand the formatting and the partition table entries on your SDCard (so it cleverly ignores them and reports 60MB).

[Redfez]

If you are using Windows for formatting cards, etc. then you can use SDFormatter (Google will turn that software up. It is free.) to "restore" the areas that are invisible to your Windows based systems. If you no longer want anything on the sd card and want to delete what you've written onto it, that can format and restore the size in the eyes of Windows systems, although as Dougie Lawson has pointed out the capacity hasn't really changed, merely Window's poor ability to spot it.

[topguy]

In "my computer" windows will only show the partitions ( not really disks, but disk-partitions ) that has a filesystem (FAT or NTFS) that it recognises.

If you look at your SD card with the "disk-manager" in windows it will show you the whole story.

[skywave]

Thanks Dougie, Redfez and topguy
Yeah that's what I guessed.
Is it true then, that when I boot into it from the PI, I will have 'lost' the 16GB capacity and now only have about 45MB for 'storage' (60MB minus the OS of approx 15MB)?
Yes I already found out that I can format the SD 'back' to 16GB when using SDformat - thx.
I read somewhere that there is a nix OS antiX from where you can regain the 'lost' GB's?
But if I manage to find out how to do that - would the regained GB's then still not show when booting again
from the PI?

[fruitoftheloom]

No you have not lost any capacity, Linux will read the whole card.

The FAT32 60MB partition is only the "boot" files, the Operating System partition Windows can not see hence your concern.

If you boot up the RPi it will give you a better idea of partitions on the SD Card

[skywave]

aha that's exactly the info I was searching: that it is just the boot files, and that windows just can't see the rest, and that linux will show it all!
excellent - will have a closer look when I receive my new 'toy' tomorrow
looking forward to that indeed!

[fruitoftheloom]

excellent - will have a closer look when I receive my new 'toy' tomorrow
looking forward to that indeed!

Yes over-thinking non existent issues is not good for you stress levels

[skywave]

haha - typical me - I always try to troubleshoot before I have a prob
No stress here - just an eager beaver