System not recognizing full size of hard drive

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I have a MSI notebook with Windows 7 Home Premium. The notebook has a 300g hard drive which until a recent image restore was recognized. After the restore my C partition lost about 60g of space. In the Computer management Console Disk0 is now 232.88g.

I used the factory recovery disc for a new installation and chose to restore partitions not just drive C, but to no avail. Any ideas how I can recover my disc to full size? I did not try a format.

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Chuck,

Your graphic doesn’t show the right side of the disk. Is it showing any unallocated space if you scroll the display over? :cheers:

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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The use of a 3rd party partitioning tool may show hidden partitions that the default Windows Disk Management tool cannot.
Verify what disk manager is showing you.

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RG,

Chuck’s graphic shows the size of Disk0 is 232.88 GB, and the sum of the four partitions shown adds up to that amount. I don’t think there’s anything hidden behind the right margin of Chuck’s image.

I don’t think this is a case of unpartitioned or unallocated disk space, as that would still be included in the reported size of Disk0.

Chuck,

232.8 is the size in GB of a typical 250GB hard disk, which begs the question: are you certain your disk is 300GB and not 250GB? What’s the model number?

If it is indeed a 300GB disk, then perhaps it has somehow become truncated by a hidden HPA (“Host-Protected Area“). Most partitioning tools are unaware of the existence of any HPA, but there are other tools for exposing or manipulating it, such as Hitachi’s “Feature Tool“, Seagate’s “SeaTools“, “HDAT2“, and HDDGuru’s “Capacity Restore Tool” or “Magic Boot Disk“.

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You are right RG! I went into the BIOS and confirmed 250GB. WOW! I am really getting old. Sorry fellows.

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