500GB Harddrive Problem........

L

lwylawrence

New Member
I bought a new comp with 500GB Harddrive. After i installed Window XP Pro and service pack 2, i found out that my harddrive storage only got 127GB..... Can someone help me on this?? How can i get the 500GB storage back and what should i do??? Thx
 
You bought a new system with what on it if anything for a preinstalled OS? If the drive was already partitioned, formatted, and included an operating system namely Windows there will be a hidden recovery partition storing files, drivers there. If you installed Windows onto a bare drive then you created a primary that was simply smaller then the actual drive space available.

On new 500gb drives here the total amount of space available following partitioning was about 465gb. It sounds like one of the two things happened there. Was there an OS already installed on the drive?
 
What's happened was XP didn't have 48bit LBA support when you installed it. You should be able to create a 2nd partition with the space that is left. If you want 1 big partition, try using gparted or partition magic to resize the partition.
 
First getting familiar with how partitions are created and resized will help. You will need a disk burner(cd writer or dvd burner) in order to burn the free Linux disk partitioning tool GParted onto a cd-r not cd-rw. The 0.3.3.0 release is about the 12th down from the top at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=173828

When clicking the plus sign on the left of the version a second line appears under each one. Look across for the "platform independent" label in the architecture column. You will need two things to get started there.

1) first get familiar with GParted in the documentation and screen shots seen at http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/generalities/gparted.htm

2) Since the 35mb download is in an iso disk image format you need a program that burn iso images and make the burned disk bootable. Two programs are DeepBurner and BurnOn's free version found at http://www.burnworld.com/burnoncddvd/ BurnOn has worked great here for creating the disk you boot from in order to create partitions, resize existing ones like the one you have there, and even removing them.
 
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