Missing approx. 120 GB of my hard disk drive

[olivia.tang]

When I count the space of all partitions, I come up with 130GB instead
of 250 GB. So, where did 120GB go?


Partition 1: 30 GB Windows XP Pro SP 2 live here
Partition 2: 30 GB
Partition 3: 70 GB This partition was supposed to be the dumping
grounds of 190GB.

Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar SE16 250GB

This is a new computer that my friend put together for me.
Unfortunately, he's out of town for the weekend and I really want to
fix it as soon as possible.



Thanks,
Maaya

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi,

Did your friend install the original "gold" version of WindowsXP without the
service packs? If so, then you didn't get the proper support for 48-bit LBA
and were limited to roughly 127GB of drive space. Run diskmgmt.msc and see
what this tells you about available space on the drive.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[olivia.tang]

Hi,

Did your friend install the original "gold" version of WindowsXP without the
service packs? If so, then you didn't get the proper support for 48-bit LBA
and were limited to roughly 127GB of drive space. Run diskmgmt.msc and see
what this tells you about available space on the drive.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

diskmgmt.msc told me that I had 104GB that was unallocated.
Anyways, I managed to create another partion from that and it works
now.
Thanks a lot for your help.

 

[myPC]

From what I've been told, partitioning in Windows XP will slow down your
system.

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

You've been told wrong.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[Doug Knox MS-MVP]

I sure hope so, or my systems would be crawling

 

[Guest]

Balderdash!!

From what I've been told, partitioning in Windows XP will slow down your
system.

 

[Mike Fields]

"Balderdash" ??? I have not heard that for a while.
Rates up there with "shatterpated" !! But I do
agree that it does not slow things down - at least
I have never seen any sign of that. I still remember
when 20 meg partitions were HUGE. Come to
think of it, I still have some 8" double sided floppies
down stairs in my "archive" ;-)

mikey

 

[Vanguard]

diskmgmt.msc told me that I had 104GB that was unallocated.
Anyways, I managed to create another partion from that and it works
now.

You ended up slicing the that last 190GB into 2 pieces but you
could've had it as one partition. Like Rick said, you probably don't
have SP-1 installed at a minimum (or SP-2 to include the 48-bit
addressing support added in SP-1). If you want to merge those 70 and
104GB partitions, you'll need to use something other than what comes
in Windows to do it (i.e., a 3rd party tool, like Partition Manager),
or you could delete those partitions and make one big "dumping"
partition (as you called it) and then create one big new partition.