Where did my space go??

[Pyros]

I just installed a new 160gb HD. After installing XP home, it say my drive size is 149gb. Ok Iunderstand that and expected it. Byt I havent installed anything yet and it says I have 22.7gb of used space. I estamate alittle over 1gb is windows itself. I tuned off system restore which was allocating something like 18gb for its self. But even after doing that and rebooting its still showing 22.7gb used space. Where is this used space at?? I have never had window xp do this before so I am kind lost. And suggestions is appreciated.

Tks. Pyros

 

[Pyros]

another thing. I tried to start the computet with cd rom support so I can get to a c: and run c:\> dir but it says invalid drive. It keeps starting upMSCDEX and wont let me look at anything but my cd roms and floppy. Now when I do A:\>dir even with no floppy in the drive I get a dir listing. I believe this is from when I tried to use norton ghost awhile back. any comments on this???

 

[Pyros]

ok I figured I would try deleting and reformating the drive
I ran fdisk and deleted the partition and and reinstalled the dos partition. After that I rebooted and ran fdisk again to check the partition information. this is the partition info.:

Partition-C:1 Status-A Type-PRI DOS Mbytes-21553 Usage-100%

Is this right?? why is it reporting total disk space as 21553mb? Another thing is this is right about the size of the missing space. In windows does it report the dos partition as space used??

 

[Sonny]

Do you have SP1 installed? If not you might want to read THIS.

 

[Pyros]

Tks. I had heard that before but forgot all about it. This hd came as a oem so I decided to go to the Seagate website and dl the hd utilities they have. In the setup it tells that is wont supprt disks larger than 137gb and that after installing sp1 I can partition the added space. Is it possible to add this space into the 137gb partition that is already setup whith windows installed on it?

If you havent noticed, I dont know squat about setting up partitions.

 

[Graphic67]

You need this ATAPI driver to actually use or even format over 128 gibibytes (137 gigabytes). You may also need updated IDE drivers for your motherboard. The windows driver is actually part of SP2.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;331958

I had this problem myself just two days ago on my AT7-max2.

Without using an extra program like partition magic, you can not resize the partition to include the rest of the space. You can however, partition and use the extra space as another drive letter.

For instructions on how to do this in windows xp open the "Help and Support Center" click on index, in the space for "type in the keyword to find" type partition, then double click on "creating" from the list shown. Follw the instructions. Once partitioned, you can format from the same computer management window.

 

[Pyros]

Tahnks for the help all. I finally got it right. I used the Seagate disk wizard to help me partition the extra space. now I have a 127gb and a 21gb partition.

 

[Sonny]

I'm happy you got everythng working but there are 2 things that you might want to try out so it'll be easier in the future. First is that you make an Windows XP install CD with SP1 SlipStreamed to it already, this should take care of your initial problem. Second would be to use the DiskWizard to do Low Level Formating | Zero Fill only for your HDDs & nothing else. The way it looks at space is not the same as the OS, with DiskWizard 1G = 1000MB were the OS sees it as 1G = 1024MB.

Anyways you got it fixed so enjoy the space.

 

[thorilan]

hard drive companies use diferent terminology than windows
there is giga and gigi