Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Accessing all of my Hard Disk (after partitioning)

Feb 23, 2004 3:27AM PST

My HD crashed and I bought a Western Digital 160 GB drive. Because I had an Upgrade version of Windows XP Home, I had to format and partition with ME and then upgrade. In the process, I had to limit the size of the formatting to 137 GB (I had to go FAT 32 while formatting, but converted this to NTFS when finished.

Is there a way to "reclaim" this lost storage?

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Re:Accessing all of my Hard Disk (after partitioning)
Feb 23, 2004 3:35AM PST

You'll have to go back and redo your partitions (which means reinstalling the OS if you don't have something such as Partition Magic). Be sure to stop the first one at the 137GB mark, and then make another one to pick up the slack. You can set up a simple software RAID configuration later to make it all appear as one partition to the OS or just leave it as two different partitions that show up as different drives. The choice is yours, but you have to do one or the other to reclaim that space.

- Collapse -
Re:Accessing all of my Hard Disk (after partitioning)
Feb 23, 2004 3:45AM PST
Because I had an Upgrade version of Windows XP Home, I had to format and partition with ME and then upgrade. In the process

1. Questionable!

2. The article [Q303013] describes the Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1) 48-bit Logical Block Addressing (LBA) support for ATA Packet Interface (ATAPI) disk drives that can enable the capacity of your hard disk to exceed the current 137 gigabyte (GB) limit.

Note: "Q331958" explains that if your computer has an ATA Packet Interface (ATAPI) hard disk that is larger than 137 gigabytes (GB), 1) your computer may restart instead of resuming from hibernation, 2) you may experience hard disk corruption when your computer enters either standby or hibernation, and 3) you may experience hard disk corruption when Windows XP writes a memory dump file as a result of an unrecoverable Windows error (or Stop error), unless the system is subsequently patched.

Bill Gaston
- Collapse -
Re:Re:Accessing all of my Hard Disk (after partitioning)
Feb 23, 2004 3:53AM PST

Doesn't sound like something I want to get into after spending days reconstructing the HD.

- Collapse -
Re:Re:Re:Accessing all of my Hard Disk (after partitioning)
Feb 23, 2004 5:51AM PST

I don't know the disk management tools of Windows XP nor ME, but it seems as if there is 137 GB allocated and 23 GB not allocated. Can't you simply make a second partition of 23 GB, not touching the 137 GB partition. In Windows 98 I would use fdisk; no need even to use boot diskette, I think. XP might be different, but I don't see why I shouldn't be possible in some way.

Kees

- Collapse -
Re:Re:Re:Re:Accessing all of my Hard Disk (after partitioning)
Feb 23, 2004 3:58PM PST

Fdisk won't see that 25GB of freespace. Sometime this extra space that the bios sees but not the OS could cause problem.