Need help peeps - partition problem

[NickTucker]

Hi guys, before we start i have no idea at all about computers. My laptop crashed a few days ago. It wouldn't boot up so being a novice i put the windows disk into the dvd drive. It re-installed windows onto my laptop - obviously i have lost everything. Now heres the problem. i was browsing through my computer and realised that my hard drive for the laptop had been near on halved. Before i broke the comp in the first place i had about 55gb of memory on the hard drive left - now i only have 30gb maybe less. I asked a guy at work and he mentioned something about my computer forming a partition or something along those lines. Is there anyone that could point me in the right direction in recovering any old files and also getting back my hard drive space.
Cheers dudes
Nick

 

[meanman]

right click my computer and left click manage then select disk managnment
you hard drive will be there if there is a partition it will show up and it might be unallocated so right click on it and formatt after it has formatted it should show up as a seperate hard drive under my computer if you want to have just one partition then buy partition magic and merge them

 

[flash527]

To save some money you don't necessarily have to buy anything. If you want to make it one partition, just save your data to a DVD or flash or something, then reformat again (with your windows CD) only find someone who knows how to do it right and they can put windows on one partition for you. good luck.