Vista: Where's the rest of my harddrive?

C

chineseman

[H]ard|Gawd
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Mar 28, 2004
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I just bought some new parts including the new WD640AKSS. After I put together all the hardware I popped my Vista DVD in and created a 40gb partition on the new drive. Everything installed okay but I don't have the rest of my 600gb anywhere. My 40gb partition shows up as C:/ and my DVD-drive shows up as D:/ and that's it. I have nooooo idea what to do now, helps :(
 
Click on the orb, then right-click on "Computer" and select "Manage." Click on "Disk Management" on the left side of the screen, and you should see your drive, with a lot of inallocated space. Just format it, wait for a while, and you will be good to go.
 
You're gonna need more than 40GB for Vista, that much I can promise you. 60GB is a much better "starting point" as once you get Vista SP1 installed that alone is going to consume close to 15GB alone, and as updates and software gets installed, it just continues to grow.

What you need to do now is go to Start and type diskmgmt.msc in the Search box at the bottom. That will bring up Disk Management. Before you add the partition(s) you might consider right clicking on the optical drive (currently your D: drive) and changing the drive letter to E: or F: at that point.

After you change the optical's drive letter assignment, you'll need to locate the 640GB drive, which will show the 40GB partition (unless you start over again, of course, and repartition it over as well) and the leftover space as unallocated. You right click on it - meaning the unallocated area - and choose Create partition and go through the steps.

My strongest recommendation: choose to make it an Extended partition (all of it) and then do what you will by creating Logical partitions (or just one if you want) inside the Extended. That keeps the drive letters in order (if you altered the optical as I suggested above) and not muck things up.

Just step through the steps one at a time, it's fairly easy to comprehend.

Good luck...
 
My Vista install, with Office 2007, and almost all of my programs, except games, is using 30.4GB right now.

40GB should be fin, if you don't use it for games, and clean the junk regularly (i.e. delete old restore pts).
 
Oh sweet, that worked out perfectly. Thanks for the help now I can go to work without stressing over this thing the whole day :D
 
With ~30GB in use, and the total partition size being 40GB max (roughly 75% capacity), you're approaching 85% capacity on such a setup and I promise you, once you cross that 85% capacity point, Windows performance will suffer drastically - it's a known issue with most every OS ever made. Some of them even warn you not to fill a drive/partition more than 85% capacity or data corruption is a definite possibility (HFS+ is one, there are others).

Knowing how large Vista is and how fast it can grow, that's why I said 60GB is a good starting point. That's plenty of space for the OS and a great number of applications too with a little room for expansion over time. But get to that 85% capacity mark on such a drive/partition, and the performance of Windows will be affected because the OS will spend more time trying to find free space to use for disk writes than normal. As I said, it's a known issue, and all you have to do is throw stuff on a drive/partition and push it past that 85% to see what I'm talking about.

So... 40GB for Vista ain't enough... 60GB is much better, 80GB is really nice, but more than that just for the OS partition is a bit of overkill if you're fond of separating the system/application partition from data/storage like many of us are.
 
Guess I better reformat then :(. Maybe I'll just leave it as one partition, I was using a sole 35gb raptor drive for the last six years so I really don't have much on my comp anyways.
 
Which was fine for XP, but Vista is an entirely different beast, and it's hungry for free range to play (aka free space). :)

Vista doesn't like throwing anything away, basically, so every time you update, every time you change drivers, every time you make any significant OS changes, it'll be stored in the WinSxS directory (don't mess with it or you'll muck it up even worse). Over time that directory will grow to be quite large as Vista tracks all the changes to itself and records them for possible rollbacks if needed. It's sortakinda like System Restore, but a lot more "careful" if that makes any sense. 30GB would disappear in a short period of time, say a few months at best, so... gotta give it more room to breathe.
 
40gig for vista and office = fail. you will run out of space very fast, I give you 3 weeks and you will be out.
 
I have a 60GB C: for my Vista x64 and I'm glad I didn't make it ANY smaller.
 
Back home now and all I did was Extend the 40g drive to 95g and I have 500gb left over for the D:/ drive. Did I mess something up cause it only took like 30s or is Vista that good :O
 
I believe it just does a quick format, nothing intensive.

Another plus for keeping the two partitions separate is disk fragmentation and troubleshooting. Give Windows 600GB to scatter shit across or 100? Scan 100GB for errors, or 600GB? Ect. So yeah, 100GB might be overkill, but deff keep them partitioned.
 
chineseman said:
Back home now and all I did was Extend the 40g drive to 95g and I have 500gb left over for the D:/ drive. Did I mess something up cause it only took like 30s or is Vista that good :O
Click to expand...
The partition resize functionality is good, huh? ;) That's one of the better underhyped features.
 
If he had nothing in the unallocated space and did the Extend from 40 to 95, that would happen fast, yep, beause there's no data at the 40GB point that needed to be re-allocated. If he'd already created the 40GB and then created that unallocated space it would still be a quick operation as long as no data existed on the unallocated space (even if it was partitioned and formatted). Windows stores the MFT in the middle of a partition by default (and the pagefile/hibernate file too) sooo... yeah, it should have been a quick operation.

I'd still run chkdsk manually on it just to be as sure as you can be based on what chkdsk reports. If it's clean then you're good to go.
 
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