Lost 40GB of hard drive space!

SO my 80GB laptop crashed, and went insane, so I had to reinstall XP, when I finally get back in I appear to have lost half my hard drive space, and also have two hard drives. One says it is FAT and has a 7 MB capacity, and the other says it has 37 GB of space. I am no genius, but I am confused and in dire need of help!!

Thank you!

 

Sound like you might have accidently partitioned your hard drive when you reinstalled XP.

To check stick the XP cd in & boot up. Follow the screens as if you were going to format again. Don't worry you can back out. See what it says about your hard drive there. If you want to go back to just one 80gig drive you will have to delete the partitions & install again. This will be a format (you will lose all your files so back up what you need) not just reinstalling.

 

You can also enter the disk manager in the config. panel to check if you have unnalocated space and, if so, use the disk manager to create a new partition. You cannot however extend your primary windows partition. Or you want to use software like partion magic or anything

 

Go to START-->RUN---> Type in "compmgmt.msc /s" (without quotes)--->Enter--> Double click on Disk management (under Storage Tab), and this will display all partitions, and sizes of drives. Maximise the screen if you have to. Bazza

PS: This works on XP Pro, don't know about XP Home, but assume it does. Baz

 

kk, I did that ta much but it still says I only have 37 GB of space in total - I used to have filled nearly 76 GB before the crash.

 

Try running checkdisk, type CHKDSK /R in command prompt or even better, before installing Windows