• 120 GB becomes 30 GB? (XP SR1)

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    WStfboni
    AskWoody Lounger
    August 27, 2004 at 1:57 pm #409126

    When my son set up XP on a new WD 120 GB HD, he somwhow manager to “convert” it to a 30 GB drive….our “C” drive has only ~30 GB available. Problem is I can’t find the other 90 GB to format/partion/whatever. When I go into the XP admin tools for partition management, the other 90 doesn’t show up so I can’t click on it to remedy the situation. Likewise with partition manager. You would think that it is actually a 30 GB drive, but that isn’t the case.

    I know one solution is to wipe out the whole drive and start over. Since we have put 20 plus GB on the C drive already, I’d kind of like to explore other options before biting the bullet and re-formatting the whole drive. Is there something I can try with FDISK (or GDISK)?

    BTW, When I run “error checking” in Partition manager , it shows no errors…

    Any help is appreciated.

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    • WSCalvin
      AskWoody Lounger
      August 27, 2004 at 3:26 pm #869598

      There was an issue with formatting drives > approx. 30GB as FAT32 under XP. I don’t remember the details though-except that to get larger drives formatted as FAT32 you had to boot from a Win98 floppy & format from that. XP would use the larger drives, but not format them.

      Since I don’t remember the details (like what happened when you tried formatting a larger drive) I don’t know whether or not this relates to your problem-but it might be worth a search if you did format the drive as FAT32.

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    • WSCalvin
      AskWoody Lounger
      August 27, 2004 at 3:26 pm #869599

      There was an issue with formatting drives > approx. 30GB as FAT32 under XP. I don’t remember the details though-except that to get larger drives formatted as FAT32 you had to boot from a Win98 floppy & format from that. XP would use the larger drives, but not format them.

      Since I don’t remember the details (like what happened when you tried formatting a larger drive) I don’t know whether or not this relates to your problem-but it might be worth a search if you did format the drive as FAT32.

      Reply | Quote
    • WSbigaldoc
      AskWoody Lounger
      August 27, 2004 at 7:38 pm #869688

      I think Calvin is correct about the inability of XP to handle formatting of large FAT drives. You might have to resort to some third-party software like Acronis Disk Director to see if it can help you correct this partitioning problem without losing any data. It is sage advice for all Windows users to keep a good Win98SE boot disk around for such things as this. If you don’t have such an animal, you might want to visit BootDisk.Com to make yourself a boot disk for future use.

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    • WSbigaldoc
      AskWoody Lounger
      August 27, 2004 at 7:38 pm #869689

      I think Calvin is correct about the inability of XP to handle formatting of large FAT drives. You might have to resort to some third-party software like Acronis Disk Director to see if it can help you correct this partitioning problem without losing any data. It is sage advice for all Windows users to keep a good Win98SE boot disk around for such things as this. If you don’t have such an animal, you might want to visit BootDisk.Com to make yourself a boot disk for future use.

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    • joep517
      AskWoody MVP
      August 27, 2004 at 8:03 pm #869696

      If it becomes necessary to reformat, I’d suggest you consider NTFS as the file system. Here’s a Microsoft article – Choosing between NTFS, FAT, and FAT32

      Joe

      --Joe

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    • joep517
      AskWoody MVP
      August 27, 2004 at 8:03 pm #869697

      If it becomes necessary to reformat, I’d suggest you consider NTFS as the file system. Here’s a Microsoft article – Choosing between NTFS, FAT, and FAT32

      Joe

      --Joe

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    Reply To: 120 GB becomes 30 GB? (XP SR1)

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