Windows doesn't acknowledge half of my hard drive

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pamperedpet32

n00b
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Dec 3, 2004
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Sorry if this question is in the wrong forum! My 40GB drive was partitioned by some guy in a repair shop, then the repair shop closed down :mad:. Then the pc deleted some of windows so I had to reinstall it. Now although the bios reads 40GB windows only has a 20GB hard drive, it only acknowledges what used to be the c drive. How do I get my 40GB back without losing all the music off the drive?
 
When you did the "reinstall," did you install a different/upgrade of the OS? Or did you not format part of your drive when you did the reinstall? It sounds like you didn't format the drive properly.
 
Backup your tunes to DVD if possible - best way to ensure you don't lose data ;)

Then you can try something like Partition Magic....
 
Run -> compmgmt.msc -> storage -> disk management(local)

Hopefully that will allow you to reclaim your space (this is assuming it's windows XP)
 
Thanks for the replies. Unfortunately its windows 98se and I didn't format the drive then because I was able to recover all of my old files then. The weird/stupid thing is that the original windows 98se that was on the computer is still in the c drive that I'm using now. I'm afraid to delete it though in case that the new windows is using it in any way!
 
go into the commandline and type fdisk

there should be an option to show what partitions are on the disk. if there is unpartitioned space, boot into dos and partition it, format it, and reboot.
 
I finally plucked up the courage to format the hard drive but it didnt solve my problem. I still only have half the hard disk where windows (still 98SE) is concerned. Fdisk doesnt recognise any partition. It says there's one drive with 40GB. Any more help??
 
20Gb is an odd limit? Anyway. Read this and see if anything applies.

Could you upgrade to 2000 or xp?
 
I don't think that this has anything to do with limits and barriers but I will read that article tomorrow. I could upgrade but Id prefer to keep 98SE anyway; I have old software that won't run on my XP computer. I was at the partition table fairly recently and it reported a non-partitioned 40 GB hard drive, from what I could understand The other strange thing is that in the drive space program that comes with Windows it says the capacity is 2GB
 
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