I have an 80gb HD, now it only reads at 31 gb. How do I get my 80gb back?

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gramarye

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Hello, I recently installed an OS on my 80gb hard drive, it was the primary and the onlyhard drive during installation. Now, it only reads as 31 gb, I do not have any important data at all, Idon't mind sweeping the whole drive to get my 80 gb back, is there a solution to this?

I already tried disk management and format it, but it still stays at 31.49 gb.


Thanks for your time, I appreciate your help.
 
Fox_T said:
same here, got 320 it says 306 or 310. b4 had 200gb said 186gb
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this is normal. 1024 is not the same as 1000.


gramarye, did you make the partition use the entire drive during the install?
 
When ever you buy a new hard drive, take the total size and times it by .93 (ie your 320 * .93 = 297.6)

OP right click on 'My Computer' and click on 'Manage' and then click on 'Disk Management'. There you will see your hard drive listed, it will show you if there is a partition that needs to be setup or not.
 
In windows in local disk properties it is correct 320.062.062.592bytes - 320gb, but when installing windows after formating it did show close to only 300gbs, its allways been like that with the other pcs 4 me,.. but yours is almost half the space gone thats strange.. mayb partition? what does it say in C's properties?
 
Are you using FAT32? Or is this a very old BIOS?

Fox_T: There's plenty of information on this. There are 320 billion bytes on your drive, but computers like counting in powers of 2. Windows counts gigabytes as (1024^3) bytes. So there are 298*(1024^3) bytes on your drive. This is normal. No need to hypothesize.
 
ok, i dont really care anyway I rarely use half of it, Im more worried about 80g to 30g its not like 320 to 300
 
did you format it as FAT32 in Windows XP? Windows xp has an artificially imposed limit of 32GB on FAT32 partitions, because FAT32 sucks and they want you to use NTFS instead.
 
There are free utilities to go beyond XPs artificial 32GB limit for FAT32. Although I recommend NTFS if your OS is Windows 2000 or higher.

The other thing to check is some drives have jumpers to CAP the size for backwards compatability. Make sure you didn't accidentally set/remove a jumper you shouldn't have.
 
Fox_T said:
ok, i dont really care anyway I rarely use half of it, Im more worried about 80g to 30g its not like 320 to 300
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yeah, i know that when you buy a new hard drive there's a few gb lost, that's normal, but for me When Installed an OS (Mac OS X) it's partitioned at 31.94 gb for some reason. How do I just fix it back to normal?

I'm looking into Seagates ATA section about "why is my hard drive not showing it's full capactiy?"
 
Yes it does sim a bit odd - more then half ya hard drive disapeared. Was this a legal product, can you contact manufacturers or support staff? - itd b my best bet, sory but Im no expert when it comes to pcs.
May b a stupid question but still... : have you ever allocated any virtual memory in windows, coz thats how I think I screwed my 200Gs up.., I gave ~ 15000mb - 30000mb to virtual mem. its shortly after that my hd bcame corrupted... I think that was in vista too.
 
Fox_T said:
Yes it does sim a bit odd - more then half ya hard drive disapeared. Was this a legal product, can you contact manufacturers or support staff? - itd b my best bet, sory but Im no expert when it comes to pcs.
May b a stupid question but still... : have you ever allocated any virtual memory in windows, coz thats how I think I screwed my 200Gs up.., I gave ~ 15000mb - 30000mb to virtual mem. its shortly after that my hd bcame corrupted... I think that was in vista too.
Click to expand...

yes this product is legit, its a hard drive i've always used, the reason why it's at 31.49 gb is because when installed the OS it partinioned i guess that much space, so now im' installing this seagate tool that will bring its full capacity back. thanks for your help and replies by the way.
 
So Seagate Technical Support helped me solve this problem through the cd, which I luckily found in a box full of old computer stuff. Anyway, this capacity problem was reported being quite common and was easily fixed.

The phone support ended with a few questions by Seagate, "how do you feel about Best Buy's Geek Squad", "do you think Seagate will be effective having something like that?" kind of random I say...
 
gramarye said:
So Seagate Technical Support helped me solve this problem through the cd, which I luckily found in a box full of old computer stuff. Anyway, this capacity problem was reported being quite common and was easily fixed.
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Could you go into a little more detail on what the problem was and how it was fixed? What OS did you use in the end?
 
drizzt81 said:
Could you go into a little more detail on what the problem was and how it was fixed? What OS did you use in the end?
Click to expand...

I'll do my best of everything I remembered over the phone.

A link that further explains such capacity issues like i had is: http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...toid=a65b5b1142aec010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

To answer you OS question, it was with any OS (i tired Windows XP, Vista, Mac OS X) Basically the HDD was partitioned to that certain amount for some reason, probably due to an accidental click when installing.

Basically, I called Seagate Technical Support. I called twice, depending how luck you are, you may get a person who goes straight to helping your situation out, or you may get a person who will spend the first 10 minutes confirming your name and the legitimacy of your product, and asking for your info (names, e-mail, number, etc) < I'm assuming that is the formal way and how Seagate would want their customer support to do. I was worried since this hard drive is probably beyond its warrantly, but they still helped, and thats what mattered. I later told them I own several Seagate HDD, so it should not have been a problem anyway (Have a server consisting of all Seagate HDD)

Problem:
Hard Drive: 80gb Seagate Barracuda IV, 7200.9 rpm, PATA/IDE hard Drive
When first installed Mac OS X with it, it was read as 74.5 gb (which is the correct size). After creating a partition, I realized, eversince then, the hard drive was read at 31.49 gb. So I thought, maybe It's just the Mac, So I plugged it in a PC as a secondary drive to double-check in disk management the disk size. It read the same. So obviously, it wasn't a factor of whether it was HFS+, FAT32, or NTFS. Formatting into different formats did not recover the capacity it should have been.
I later called Seagate Technical Support (1-800-SEAGATE). The agent made sure the HDD capacity read the same in BIOS; it read the same, 31.49 gb. So I performed the following steps over the phone:

Solution:

Steps I Took:
1) Find Seagate DiscWizard Tools Disc (came with the Hard Drive, I was actually surprised to find it since I never keep that stuff anyway...so TIP: Keep those important discs)
2) Boot with CD, and get into the DiscWizard Tool
3) Push Cancel at the Prompt
4) Select option "Hard Disc Size and Capacity"
5) Verify that the Current capacity size is the same as Recommended Capacity - In my case, it was not, so I chose the option to "restore defaults"
6) Restart, and boot w/ same disc, and confrim Current is equivalent to Recommended, and it was, and now my hard drive is back at 80gb.

Please do let me know if you have any questions. This is for Seagate HDD, but i'm sure other HDD companies would have the same. I can honestly say those Discs are actually useful and DO keep them in a safe place for such situations like this. Honestly, I hoped to easily fix that problem through Windows Disk Management Tool or a third-party software, but this worked just as efficiently and worked, so this method would probably save you a lot of time.

*Should take no longer than 5-10 minutes (depending on the speed of your computer rebooting, entering bios, booting from cd, etc...)

Let me know if I need to make things clear if it's hard to understand.

Regards.
 
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