Hi everyone,

I have a 40GB Hardrive as my C: but this is quickly running out of space - God knows why, maybe because windows takes up so much room? (perhaps someone can tell me that answer too?)

Anyway, because i was running out of space, i put in a hardrive i had bought not long back calling it E:

The computer has formatted it as NTFS but says it is only 8GB big. The Hardrive should be 20GB.

Not totally sure why or how to fix it, i came up with this crazy idea...how about reformatting the drive through the command prompt then formatting it as FAT32 (whats the difference between NTFS and FAT32?)

This didnt solve it, the new hardrive still tries to convince me that it is only 8Gb's not 20.

Is it to do with Partitions?

I would really appreciate it if someone could help me out.

Thanks in anticipation.

Chas

yo chas

it is because of partitions. NTFS (New tedchnology file system) is used in later versions of windows... generally win NT onwards i think. FAT32 is an older file system and not really used any more.

The reason your computer is reporting your hard drive as 8Gb instead of 20Gb is probably because you have an 8GB NTFS partition on your computer and presumably a 12GB FAT32 partition.

To fix the problem, you need to rremove the fat32 partition (make sure there is no data on it that you want first!). Im not entirely sure how to do this but if you google it then you will probably be able to read how to.

In fact, i have just done just that for you and got this back from microsft as the number one hit from google:

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/bo.../ls/022102.asp

It seems to go into detail about how to do it. I suggest printing the page before you start though. Anyway - hope that helps. Maybe you could hekp me with my problem.....its the one about the common task bar.

Thanks NDFROSE, I have replied on your topic, but i cant help you out, everything that has been suggested would be what i would have suggested. Really really sorry.

Chas

PS Do you know if it would be cheaper to build a PC your self rather than buying one from somewhere like PC world? I built two in the passed but that was 6 years ago and stuff has changed so much since.

Is it as difficult these days to do?

its not really that hard to do. The easy part is putting it together and the hard part is loading the software. Since all the hardware thats available these days have industry standard connections, its quite hard to go wrong. I wouldnt buy anything from pc world! EVER! its awful. The staff dont know anything technical, the hardware is overpriced and the range of stuff they sell is rubbish. MY advice to you is to find a small independant computer hardware store in your area and ask them to construct a pc for you. You will get the exact specs you want with the sotware you want.

For example, the pc i am using now is one that was built in a small pc shop down the road from me. It cost £480 in total (2ghz 64 bit athlon processor, 1gb ram, 256 geforce 6600 gt graphics, 80gb hard drive) and even if you were able to buy that kind of specific spec in pc world, it would have cost substantially more. Plus, should you need any after sales service then you would probably get quicker, more copmpetent and more reliable service in a small shop than pc world.

Thats my opinion anyway.