500GB Hard Drive Turned to 32GB?

Ok, so, I had a 500GB hard drive.. then I reformatted my computer, and now I only have a 32GB hard drive!! How did this happen?!

 

what os do you have? did you reformat to ntfs or fat? if im not mistaken the ntfs doesnt do that but the fat just might. not sure how to fix it other than reformatting again and choose ntfs. would be my guess going by the info you posted

 

so HD has many bad sector and corruptted,thats why.I've encounter this one, my solution is i used partition magic 8 or 9 will do, first i redistribute free space and merge it then i partition again , last format it. it will goes back to 500g. same probs

 

I use Windows Vista, I have a HP Pavilion Laptop.

 

what did you in formatting? where did you format?

 

I'm not sure if I chose FAT or NTFS, I used a recovery disk that I bought from HP.

 

Also, right now I have NTFS.

 

Nevermind guys, I got it. I used PartitonMagic and got my drive size back. Thanks jblim!

 

your welcome anytime!!! goodluck to your reborn HD..:wave