Formatting Harddrives

[CfHrEeSaSk]

I recently formatted my hard drive, only to notice later that its size was drastically reduces - from about 80 GB to 26 GB. Is this an expected side-effect? If so, why does this happen? Are there any other drawbacks of formatting hard drives?

Thanks!

 

[Agentbolt]

I have absolutely no idea why that happened, or what you should do to fix it, but you most definitely should not lose space due to the reformatting. What program did you use to reformat it?

 

[tallman45]

Is the drive partitioned ?

 

[imported_Kiwi]

You asked a question without providing anything in the way of data points that would give anyone even a single bit of an idea what you are doing, or what you think you are doing.

1. Kind of computer?
2. Operating system?
3. Make and model of hard drive?
4. Reason you needed to reformat -- and
(4 1/2) HOW you went about performing that exercise?

That's just for starters. But there are numerous factors that relate to how any operating system deals with various bits of computer hardware. The oldest of computers still more or less usable in the real world often cannot identify large hard drives without something called an "Overlay". If you don't renew that overlay in the reformatting process, a lot of odd results are possible.

:frown:

 

[CfHrEeSaSk]

This is an HP pavilion PC, so there is only one partition for HP recovery.

 

[CfHrEeSaSk]

I guess I should've given more info:

1. HP pavilion, model # 753n
2.53 GHz pentium 4
512 MB ddr sdram
80 GB original hard disk (ultra DMA - whatever that means? - hard drive interface standard?)
64 MB Intel integrated graphics

2. windows xp home

3. Maxtor 6Y080P0

4. Computer was slow, lot of junk - felt lazy to clean it up manually, so I ran the "HP PC system recovery" already built in.

I guess I'll ask for help on HP support.