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Question

how can i recover lost hardrive space?

Apr 1, 2012 2:28AM PDT

i recently got a sata hdd enclosure for a 2.5" hardrive from my broken laptop and i used it on my desktop but the old system files were still on it and they wouldn't delete so i did something stupid and used a program called kill-disk which basically wipes out the drive, except that when i used it - it wiped out the drive containing the system files causing me to loose 30GB. if you're going to tell me how ******** this step was - spare me, i'm totally aware, thanks.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Some think it's loss, others know it's MATH
Apr 1, 2012 3:16AM PDT

Let's take a 1TB drive as an example.

Now the newcomer will think it's 1,000 Billion bytes and another will think it's 1,024 Billion bytes.

That's 24GB and I didn't go very deep into how we measure disk space and how a short cut in Windows has cause a few hundred posts like yours.
Bob

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the thing is that before it was split into 2 drives
Apr 1, 2012 7:35AM PDT

with two different letters - one had 30GB and the other had 70GB but now i only have one drive with 70GB, so how do i recover the lost 30GB?

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Re: drive
Apr 1, 2012 7:41AM PDT

You had one drive with two partitions (one 30 GB, one 70 GB). Now it seems you have a drive with one partition f 70 GB and 30 GB unallocated. Use your OS'es disk management program to allocate that 30 GB to a new partition.

http://www.windowsreference.com/windows-vista/how-to-use-disk-management-in-vista/ tells how to find disk management in Vista. In XP or Windows 7 it might be slightly different. In Linux or MacOS it's totally different. If necessary, use google to find the details for your OS.

Kees

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(NT) thanks, it worked! :)
Apr 1, 2012 5:13PM PDT