Missing about 80gig in my 120gig hard drive

[mister_dd5]

im hoping someone can help a newbie out...

I had partitioned my 120gig samsung harddrive last year,

last month my processor burned out, so I got a new one and reformatted everything to get a clean slate.

however, my computer only detects around 39gig of the 120gig drive.

can I remove the partition to see the rest of the drive or can I make the other partition 're-appear' ?

 

[phreejak]

Partition magic is a good program for just that issue.

 

[mister_dd5]

ok thanks i'll give it a try

 

[phreejak]

It's the program I use to resixe partitions. It can even resize the partition that the OS is on without damaging the OS.

 

[mister_dd5]

is partition magic user-friendly?

its good to know that it wont damage the OS because my OS is installed on the 120gig right now.

there's a trial version available! woohoo! im downloading it now...

 

[Vastare]

One other fix for this problem:

Click Run

Type in "MMC", then enter

Click on File, then click on Add/Remove

Click Add on the bottom left of screen

A new window will open, Click on DISK MANAGEMENT, then Click ADD below it
CLick FINISH on the new window that pops up

Click on CLOSE

Click on OK



You should now have a window, Highlight the Disk Management key. Your window will now show All Hard Drives, Optical drives, etc...........

You will also see an area that says UNFORMATTED DISK SPACE. You can use the control panel to FORMAT this space.

This will save you the purchase cost of Partition Magic but will give you another Logical drive with your missing space.

Hopes this helps out.

Drive Safe
Drink Milk
Peace........
Vastare

 

[mister_dd5]

thank you
thank you
thank you

i shall give this a try.

i already installed partition magic and the program coudlnt detect the 'lost' 80gig. either that or i dont know how to use partition magic

 

[mister_dd5]

umm...the UNFORMATTED DISK SPACE section didnt come out. does this mean my drive is damaged?

 

[hammerhead2]

had a similar proplem with older mobo once,, check the bios settings
some had a setting for dos that limits your hd space to appx 40 gig
in the bios ( why not 32 meg the dos limit I don't know ) also
some drives have pin settings for the same thing check the drive
face for a pin out listing my drive was also a 120 gig (WD)

 

[mister_dd5]

can you please give me a step by step tutorial how to change the bios settings/pin settings? I have no idea what to do 8O

 

[Codesmith]

If Windows XP can't see the remaining unformatted space then something odd is going on which you will have to fix before resizing your partitions.

--

The label of the hard drive usually contains the jumper settings.

There is usually an unlisted option to clip the drive to 32 GB for compatiblity on older systems.

So double check the jumpers.

--

Also anytime you resize a partition you are running the risk of losing all your data. If for any reason the resizing stops before completion you are in bad shape.

Definately backup everything to a 2nd drive, or DVD+RW (using True Image 9) or just manually backup all the importatn files. Then use Partition Magic.

You can also resize the partition during the restore operation, so if you had to buy just one program I would chose True Image 9 over Partition Magic.

Other free alterantives exist, but I haven't personally used them.

 

[hammerhead2]

thanks codesmith
I didn't get back to see if there was any more there till today

aside used true image several times at work to save failing
and undersized HD's, works very well, One of the drives there
was set to 32 gig limit,,,Last systems administrator put the smallest
HD's on every thing ( fine with win98/2000 but XP to many updates)

 

[Sonic_Reducer]

Do you have SP1 or SP2 intalled on windows?? if not insalled it usually helps that.

 

[Codesmith]

SP1 & SP2 allow you to create partitions larger than 127 GB.

However SP0 still sees additional capacity as unpartitioned space when viewd from the Disc Management Console.

In any case this drive is <127 GB and so it won't be affected.

If Windows is seeing 40 GB then its due to a jumper/BIOS/Drive Overlay Softare issue or some sort.

I probably should have asked if this drive ever had special sofware installed so it could work at full capacity on a MB that only accepts drives <32 GB.

 

[monkeymanuk]

Large Hard disk drives often come with a jumper to limit the size. I would check the jumper settings!

 

[mister_dd5]

thanks! you guys were right. it was 'just' the jumper settings. hehe. didnt know much about computers and i'm still learning until now

this is an excellent community! thank you again to all

 

[940Socket2me]

Uh. Not to sound like a NUB, but check the jumper on the HD. Somtimes jumpers can limit the amount of space seen on the drive by the BIOS. Legacy throw back shizzle mah nizzle.