lost 40 gig on hardrive after reinstalling windows

After reinstalling windows due to virus i installed it from the disk straight from windows i didn't boot from cd which may down to the problem. Once i reinstalled windows i went to check the space on the hardrive after reinstalling some old programs and istead of it being 80gig it was now only 40gig, is there a reason for this? also i looked into the files i had on the hardrive and noticed two of every user, then i thought that it had doubled up on itself is this possible?
thanks

 

Are you sure when you reformated your computer you deleted windows or did you install windows ontop of your previous one? try turning off system restore to that can take up alot of space.

Im pretty sure if you dont boot form the cd it dosen't reformat windows it just overwrites it.


Read this to...

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=103417

 

Also--if its an older computer, reinstalling XP may have destroyed the drive overlay.

It would be best to list your PC specs.

 

Specification:
* hardrive 37.2 gig
*microsoft windows xp professional
*version 2002 service pack 1
*pentium(R) CPU 1.80GHZ
*512mb ram

Is there a simple way of unistalling the original version of windows if it is still on there or even finding out whether it is on there. Or is wiping the hardrive a better option. Either way i have still lost 40gig. The only other sugestion maybe when i had the hardrive replaced due to viruses and they may have put a 40gig in rather than a 80gig is there any way of finding that out aswell.
Thanks

 

You need to boot from the CD if you want a clean install of windows.

After booting from the CD, windows will load the necessary drivers and then show the existing partitions on the drive.

You want to delete the existing partition first. Windows will ask you if you want to do this - you will first hit the "Esc" key to do a fresh install then hit the "D" key to delete the existing partition and then the "L" key to confirm you want to delete the existing partition.

Once that is done your entire hard drive will be reformatted and available for use.

You need to get into the bios to do this, and you will also need to set it to boot from the CD first and HD second. You can also verify the size of the HD in the bios.

Hope this helps.