Hard drive question... xp shows 10 of 120 gigs?

[tjr2mental]

I am putting togeather a pc, and when I did the format for me new 120 gig hard drive I set up c: as being 10 gigs as I am only going to use that for programs and the opeating system. Now that Xp home is installed it does nto show any other part of the 110 gigs that I still have on the hard drive. What do I need to do to get to be able to use the other part of my hard drive?

 

[Willoughbyva]

Go to administrative tools > Computer management> Disk Management that should get you in the right ball park.

 

[tjr2mental]

ok.. now that I am there... it says that it is connecting to logical disk management server. Should I just sit here and wait for it to finally connect?

 

[Willoughbyva]

It should come up and tell you the drives you have on your computer. It should show the drive you just put in and show a bunch of free spaceon it. Just left click on the unpartitioned space and go from there.

EDIT how long have you waited?

 

[tjr2mental]

well, it has been about 10 minutes now. is it suppost to open right up and show the drives, and the free space that is still used on the drive?

 

[Willoughbyva]

That is to long. List your system specs and if you are on a network.

Are you using xp home or pro? Sorry I reread your post. In my xp home it pops right up in about 5 or 6 seconds.

 

[tjr2mental]

AMD 2100 Alon XP Palomino, 1024 megs of Samsung DDR333 ram, 2 120 gig Maxor hard drives, Asus Nforce2 A7N8X Delux, ATI 9000Pro 128mb DDR w/vivo.

So, somthing must really be wrong with my pc if it is taking this long to get into that part I guess.

Argh!

 

[Willoughbyva]

Do you have the latest drivers and patches for xp? I really don't know what could cause it, but I'm not an expert either. Try booting into safe mode and see if it will work.

 

[Bloodstein]

Umm....what did u do to the other 110megs? did create an extended partition there and formatted it to fat32 or ntfs?

XP does not show the other partition if it does not recognised the file system (eg. if ur using linux file system on the other partition).

And if u didn't even create a partition there then, it'll probably for sure not show it.

Try partition magic to create partitions.

or if ur confident use fdisk....

 

[tjr2mental]

ok, so I am using service pack one for xp home, and as far as I know I have used the latest drivers. Safe mode did the same thing where it just sat there and said that it was connecting to logical disk management server so I guess that did not work.

Bloodstein... I have done nothing with the other 110 gigs... xp does not even see them right now. It is a new hard drive that has never had anything put on it. I will go out today and get partition magic and see if that does the trick.

 

[911paramedic]

Did you ever fdisk and format it, or are you relying on xp to do that? I always fdisk and set them up that way. My fdisk I did the other day only showed ~10gig of an 80gig drive during my first pass with it, when I created the first one I just put in 20% for the active partition. After it set that up it did show the rest of the drive correctly, so I set up the extended partition with the rest.

The first check that fdisk did said it was only a ~10gig drive for me too, but it showed correctly after the first partition.

 

[tjr2mental]

yes, I did the fdisk to set up th c partition on the drive. While it has been about a year sence I did my last pc, I thinkt hat it set up the c: drive, and then let me set up the rest after I did that. This time it setup the c: drive, and then I installed xp. Now that I have xp put on my pc, I figured that I could just go in and set up the other partitions but I have yet to find a way that I can do that.

I will go out to best buy and pick up partition magic this afternoon and see if that will let me set up the rest of the drive. Is that the best thing that I can do at this point?

 

[911paramedic]

Originally posted by: tjr2mental
yes, I did the fdisk to set up th c partition on the drive. While it has been about a year sence I did my last pc, I thinkt hat it set up the c: drive, and then let me set up the rest after I did that. This time it setup the c: drive, and then I installed xp. Now that I have xp put on my pc, I figured that I could just go in and set up the other partitions but I have yet to find a way that I can do that.

I will go out to best buy and pick up partition magic this afternoon and see if that will let me set up the rest of the drive. Is that the best thing that I can do at this point?

run fdisk again and use option 4 I think it is, to view partition information. Just view the information, dont make any changes, and exit without doing a thing. You just want to see if it is all set up, it should tell you the drive letters, partitions, and sizes. If you dont see a drive letter on the extended partition, give it one.

That is all I can think since you went into the disk management and couldn't see it there.

 

[Bloodstein]

Ok, you really need ANOTHER partition on the 110gigs. Yes, you have one partition (woohoo!) on the 10 gigs and you formatted it, I suspect the XP installation automatically formatted it for you. But you also need another file system on the 110 gigs. To have a file system you need to "format" it. And before you can format it, you need another partition on it.

As for buying partition magic....well, in your case, the solution is not very complicated. You could do just fine with the fdisk program that comes (I think?) with win XP. It's not got a cool GUI on it but it does the trick. Like the dude above said, run fdisk, select the last option and post the result here. Partition magic is only really useful if you're truying to change your partition sizes etc (ie. if you want ur 10 gig partition to really be 12 gigs, etc). For ur prob, partition magic is a waste of money.

Let us know how things go...

 

[911paramedic]

Originally posted by: Bloodstein
Ok, you really need ANOTHER partition on the 110gigs. Yes, you have one partition (woohoo!) on the 10 gigs and you formatted it, I suspect the XP installation automatically formatted it for you. But you also need another file system on the 110 gigs. To have a file system you need to "format" it. And before you can format it, you need another partition on it.

As for buying partition magic....well, in your case, the solution is not very complicated. You could do just fine with the fdisk program that comes (I think?) with win XP. It's not got a cool GUI on it but it does the trick. Like the dude above said, run fdisk, select the last option and post the result here. Partition magic is only really useful if you're truying to change your partition sizes etc (ie. if you want ur 10 gig partition to really be 12 gigs, etc). For ur prob, partition magic is a waste of money.

Let us know how things go...

Fdisk is free, from any boot disk you made. Like I said and Bloodstein said again, you have to make an extended partition with the rest of the space.

 

[Dowfen]

Yeah, allocate the space to a second partition, then XP should be able to see it and then you can format it within XP.

Eric