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General discussion

Hard drive space disappeared.

by Sigurd02 Jul 31, 2007 4:02PM PDT

I have a WD250gig HDD running on Windows XP SP2. The amount of space on the drive is not being recognized properly by windows. Disk management/properties/partition magic all say there is only 128gigs available on it. It is not a new HDD and this problem only occured after i had deleted my partitions (I had a single 100gig and a 135gig) and tried to reformat the drive. XP is running on my 2nd HDD right now. I've tried chkdsk, partition magic and WD's diagnostic program which all said the drive was fine. Is there anything else i can try or do to get the remaining ~100gigs back? Thanks.

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3 Posts
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You don't reformat a drive.
by Kees Bakker Jul 31, 2007 8:04PM PDT

You (re)format partitions. The drive might be 'fine' with one 135 Gb partition and 100 Gb not allocated, but maybe it's not what you want. Tell more what disk management and partition magic say about partitions and space not allocated other than "fine". Simply because that's not what they say.

Kees

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If you have already installed XP ...
by Edward ODaniel Aug 1, 2007 5:59AM PDT

you can simply go into disc management and partition and format the remaining free space on the drive.

The reason you only got the 128 is because Windows XP without Service Packs simply doesn't "see" more than the 128. Had you re-installed using an installation disk that already included a service pack the whole drive would have been recognized. Out of the box and without any service pack Windows XP is NOT capable of supporting 48-bit logical block addressing (LBA). This refers to the number of sectors that a PC can recognize on a hard drive. The 24-bit addressing used by older hardware and OSs limits the amount of data they can recognize on a single hard disk (the reason drive overlay software was "popular" when large hard drives first started becoming commodity items).

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Yeh, I meant partitions.
by Sigurd02 Aug 1, 2007 7:46AM PDT

Thanks guys, everything was fine after i installed SP2, still can't believe that was the problem. XD

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