patitions help please (sorry if this is wrong fourm)

Hey I have been asked to install some software on a computer at a local library of mines and in the process of doing this I took the computer apart while working on another hardware issue and noticed that the harddrives were 40gb and I thought to myself ok 40gb thats plenty big enough im sure ill be able to install whatever they need me to but then once I turned it on and looked at the properties of C Drive its capacity is only 3.90gb and that is the only drive there is ... well something isnt adding up C drive witch is where windows is installed is only total capacity of 3.90 gig where were am i loosing 37gb can someone pleeeeeease tell me how I can access this lost space ?

 

You need some disk partitoning software to do it safely.
You can also do it through fdisk at the "C" prompt but I don't know how safe that is when it comes to saving the info on there

 

Majorgeeks has some partitions apps that can help. I'm not sure which ones(I haven't needed any yet), but someone will pop in here and tell you what you can use.

 

I'd check what fat the drive was partitioned in. FAT16 has a 4GB limit on partition size, whereas FAT32 has a 2TB limit on partition size. Here is some info if that is the case: http://kb.indiana.edu/data/agmu.html?cust=070141.17052.131

Here is a partition manager: http://www.ranish.com/part/

Good Luck

 

Click on Start, go to your control panel then click on administrative tools. After that click on computer management, then look at the disk management under storage. From there you should be able to see how your disk is partitoned and creat new partitions from there.

 

well I like your idea killing time but the only thing is , im not there now I will check when I go back down there but the systems are running Windows NT and I dont believe there is adminstrative tools in NT , correct me if im wrong please

 

You can use FDISK.EXE to look at the current partition structure safely -- but don't use it to change the partition structure unless you want to lose everything on the drive.

If you want to change the partitioning on the drive without destroying the data, use a utility like Partition Magic -- and make sure you have a current backup. If something falls off the rails while the partition structure is being re-written (a power failure, maybe?), your data is toast.