200gb hard drive reading as 80gb??

joe123

Ive noticed that my hard drive which is a Samsung SpinPoint P120S 200GB SATA2 is reading as a 80gb drive...

A while back my psu failed but seeing as it was my first build i brought it into a pc shop just to make sure it wasnt my fault that it wasnt working. I told them i reckon it was the psu but of course they had the check everything...formated the hard drive and everything. Turned out I was right and it was the psu...but anyways. He told me at the time there was some corrupted memory or something along those lines on my hard drive.

Now what im wondering is would this of caused a 200gb hard drive to become 80gb or maybe he partitioned it and its now reading as this? Its been ages since I was able to check these sort of things so is there anyway I can check whats going on with the size of my hard drive?

By the way it reads when you first turn on the pc ( on the black with white writing screen) as 200gb....

Soundman

Right click My Computer and click on Manage. Then click on Disk Management in the window that opens.

What is listed in under that? How many HDD's are in the comp? Just the one? Does it look like the HDD is partitioned from that window?

joe123

yeah just the one hard drive. Right im after doing that.

It says ( c: ) 80.42 gb ntfs in one small box with a blue heading. Then right next to it in another small box it says 105.89 gb unallocated with a black heading.

There is a key at the bottom which tells you blue is for primary partition and black is for unallocated...so basically 105.89 is going to waste at the moment??

Soundman

Yes. Right click the unallocated partition and it should come up with some options. One of them should be allocate or somethign along those lines. Once you allocate it it will be usable.

joe123

when i right click it, it just says new partition...properties and help??

Soundman

No "Mark Partition as Active"?

If not just click on Partition and set the partition size as the size of the unallocated space.

joe123

nope just what I listed. I did that anyways. Thanks for the help tis appreciated.

Dampsquid

What computer shop did you bring it to? Sounds like they don't have a clue

matt-dublin

when your drive was formatted how did they do it?

by re-installing windows?

sounds like when windows was installed on it that they didn't use the whole partition, the only way to get the c drive to use it all would be to create a back image of your c drive using ghost (or similar) and re-image the drive, or to re-install windows and delete any partitions there and reformat using the whole drive.

otherwise with the spare 108gb mentioned above you could create another partition which would become youe e: drive (assuming you have only 1 cd/dvd) just format it using ntfs

matt-dublin

ps do not mark the new partition as active, windows will not load if you do.

Slow Motion

There's a program called partition magic ! I think you can get a trial version, this will allow you to allocate the unused section if your not comfortable about doing it yourself !

BKtje

Partition magic will do the job for you and you won't loose the data you currently have on the drive while it's doing it. Why MS don't develop something similar themselves yo incorporate in windows i'll never know, its fantastic*.

*maybe they did it with vista, never heard of it tho.