Hard Drive size?

  • Thread starter Thread starter JCW
  • Start date Start date
J

JCW

After installing XP Pro on my PC the Maxtor 40 gb was reduced to 14+gb. The
processor is a Intel 733 Mhz with 256 kb Ram on a K7T266 Pro 2-A board. Can
someone tell me why this happened and is there a way to fix it short of
reformatting and if that is the only remedy what steps can I take to keep it
from happening again? Thanks for any advice....

JCW
 
Basically this is one of those things which cant happen - but does

Are you sure that you do not now have two partitions.

Maybe you installed XP and left the previous OS on another partition as well
??

Go to disc management and see what it tells you
(right click my computer - manage- disc management)

Windows does not do on the fly partition changes
so you either need to start again and reformat
or buy something like symantec partition magic which will do it for you

In my experience its always better to install XP on a newly formatted
drive anyway
upgrades from W98 etc always seem to have problems
 
The other thing that you have to consider is that with every hard drive that
is manufactured, there will be a number of sectors that will be written off
as bad right off the bat, so even though the box says it's a 40GB hard drive,
it will be less than that in all actuality. I go by the rule of thumb that
if I install a hard drive, and there is more than 10% of the drive written
off like this, I take it bad. In your case, if you have more than 4GB of
missing disk space and there are no additional partitions, I'd take the drive
back if you still can.

Regards,

William
 
Thanks for the advice , and I wish I knew what I did wrong so I can avoid it
next time. In management it shows only one partition. So I guess I will
start over. I have Partition magic but don't I have to have 2 or more
partitions? How I last more than half of the drive is a mystery. Thanks
again to you both...

Peace

JCW
 
its got to be right in the bios to have any chance of being right in windows
if it really is a 40 gb drive the bios must say 40 not 14

set the bios to autodetect and see what it says
(you can set tracks sectors etc manually but you should not need to)

if it really says 14 for a 40 drive then sounds like its a physical fault on
your drive

partition magic wont help this problem
 
Thanks Patrick,

Can I reset the bios and then format the drive. I tried setting the
parameters manually but that didn't work and auto detect didn't change
anything.

JCW
 
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