I recently formatted my hard-drive and chose NTFS file system ( i know nothing about FAT/NTFS). My hard disk size is 160gb, however if i check my computer now it is a mere 30gb big. I deleted all partitions before installing windows and installed it on "unpartitioned space" if i remember correctly. Is there something ive messed up to significantly decrease my hard disk size? Can it be corrected without re-formatting? Ty for any help given

I think there is an issue with hard drives over 137 gigs.

"If the drive is bigger than 137 gigs, Right click My computer > Manage > Disk Management. You should see all you hard drives and CD drives listed, and you should also see the 160 gig in there as a dynamic disk, right click that and format it. Then go from there".

hmm, nothing but my "31.48"gb Hard disk, my cd-rom and my dvd drive listed there im afraid. there is an option to "convert to dynamic disk" when right-clicking.

thanks a lot for the reply btw

anyone know if this has something to do with me formatting it to NTFS instead of FAT?

NTFS is what you want. There is no problem there. The 137GB limit was corrected with SP1.

Did you do a Clean Install of XP using a Microsoft XP CD?

I get the impression that you either created or installed to an old partition or did not remove all the old partitions. But this should show in Disk Management.

Right click in the right hand box then Properties. How are things listed here?

Also right clicking the left side (where you saw "dynamic disk") will give you another Properties tab which should specifically ID the Drive.

righty, here goes

heres a screenie of my hdd properties page

http://img95.imageshack.us/img95/1818/hddaw0.jpg

the other properties page for the actually disk is pretty much normal, "This device is working properly." etc. Under the "volumes" tab however my "partition style" is master boot record (not sure if this is abnormal, just didnt realise i actually had a partition).

On another note, yes i did do a complete re-install of the whole operating system, all my previous files etc were formatted. I also put hard-drive jumpers in the hard disk for the first time, not sure if that was wise, but for all i know it may be the source of my problems

Im sure theres a way to view partitions before the OS is loaded on a computer, will that perhaps reveal something?

Thanks for your patience with my limited experience with this part of computing, i appreciate all your help.

When you right click the left side Properties what is the title?

e.g. Maxtor 6Y060L0 Properties

"SC3169921A Properties"

Sorry if this is tedious but I just have more questions.

What jumpers did you add or change on the hard drive?

As to your other idea about the BIOS reading; that might be worth seeing.

Enter the BIOS Setup at startup (usually by pressing the Delete key). Or look for a hotkey listed for Setup. Here locate Hard Drives and try to ID your drive. It just might be SC3169921A but curiously that returns no search results which is rare. SC is perhaps Samsung but I can find nothing definitive.

If the BIOS identifies your full drive than I would think that XP was installed onto a partition and some how the unallocated space was lost.

Did this drive work properly previously?

Also try this scan if you don't mind:

http://www.d-a-l.com/hardware-scan.php

thanks for the reply, for jumpers i went from none to this http://www.mysuperpc.com/hdu/wd1200jb_jumper_pins.jpg

i will get back to you on the bios test asap, as for the linked hardware-scan, the "SCAN NOW" button returns a page with html coding.. i might be doing something wrong, ill edit or make a new post with the bios scan results tommorow, thanks for the help so far