Half of my hard drive is missing...

[source42]

Hullo, all.

I recently purchased a computer from a friend of mine.  Unfortunately, he wiped the hard drive before he handed it over, which left me scrambling to reinstall an operating system.  No big, done it before, right?  And everything seemed to go fine.

Except, now my 160 GB hard drive is an 80 GB hard drive with no partitions.

Here's what I did:

1) First, had to install Windows 98 SE, because I only have a Windows XP upgrade disk.
2) Installing Windows 98 SE went fine, except the computer couldn't recognize the RAM and kept crashing as soon as Windows tried to load.
3) I installed the upgrade and entered the new license key I bought.
4) Windows 98 SE of course formatted the hard drive to FAT 32.  I corrected it to NTSF.

And that's all I did.  Now, as I said, the computer is not recognizing the full hard drive.  I'm sure it has something to do with it being formatted as FAT32 initially, but I can't figure out how to fix it.

My Computer:
Windows XP SP2
160 (or 80 or whatever) GB hard drive
2 GBs RAM
Motherboard: K8V-MX (already made sure the BIOS is up-to-date)

Now, something else I noticed - when I go into the BIOS and look at the primary drive, it also says it's only 80 GB, which is simply not true.  Everything in the BIOS is set to Auto detect.  I've tried messing with diskpart and Disk Manager.  There are no partitions recognized. The other half of my drive has, apparently, vanished into thin air.

So, any ideas as to how I messed this whole thing up and how I can fix it?

Thanks in advance.

[patio]

DLoad and run the setup utilities from the HDD manuf. site.

Hopefully this will correct the errors you have.

[source42]

I could try it, but I'm not sure that would help, though.  Not to mention that I have no idea who the manufacturer of the hard drive is.  The sticker has, unfortunately, been removed.  There's a standard windows driver on there now.

It worked fine for my friend last week and I haven't done much of anything to it since.

When I went a-googling, I kept seeing posts about this kind of thing pre-SP1, where people mysteriously "lost" half their drive volume, but the solutions aren't applicable to my system, as far as I can tell.

[source42]

Ok, I think I know what the problem is now.

So, when I installed W98se, it formatted my drive FAT32 because 98 had that limitation where it couldn't recognize large drives, due to the 16-bit issue.  So, when I loaded Windows 98, it messed everything up.  Installing XP wasn't enough to fix it.

Now, as for fixes, I've found several on the web, even a few offered by Microsoft, but they're for Windows 98.  Not XP.  I know if I try it, it'll make things worse.

Looking in Disk Managment isn't even showing the unallocated portion of my drive.

I honestly don't know how to fix this  beyond reformatting the whole dang hard drive, but if I do that, I'll be  back in the same place, because I only have a Windows XP upgrade disk. Yargh.  There has to be a solution.

[ale52]

Do the XP upgrade / choose to format the whole drive as NTFS.  You should see the entire drive size when doing the upgrade, if not check the BIOS to see if IT sees the whole drive size.

Alan <>< 

[source42]

I did try that earlier.  Even the BIOS is showing that it's 80 GB.

I started running chkdsk, though, and came across something that looks like a clue.  Here, it says...

CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap.
Windows found problems with the file system
Run CHKDSK with the /F <fix> option to correct these.

 78148160 KB total disk space.
 17830809 KB in 24271 files.
         7080 KB in 2519 indexes.
               0 KB in bad sectors.
     113308 KB in use by the system.
       65536 KB occupied by the log file.
 60196963 KB available on disk.

             512 bytes in each allocation unit.
 156296321 total allocation units on disk.
 120393926 allocation units available on disk.


So, my missing space is there.  Chkdsk found it.  Now, I'm not overly familiar with chkdsk. What is /F and is that going to kill my system if I try to do it?  There's not a whole lot on this computer that needs backing up at this point and I still have my laptop if the whole thing implodes.  I'd just rather not start from square one.  Thanks!

[GX1_Man]

A) You do not need to load 98 first.

B) If you don't know what is in your computer, even something as simple as the drive maker, maybe it's time to find out.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4181.html

C) Then run the diagnostics.

D) Remember even though you are saying there are no partitions, there is at least one. Otherwise nothing would load on it.

E) If the drive is not seen correctly in the BIOS, then that may need to be addressed first. Was this drive ever compressed?

[source42]

A) Then how would I load Windows XP when I only have an upgrade disk?

B) I've only had the computer about a week. And the guy I bought it from is, literrally, blind.  Give me a break.

Thanks for the program link, though.  I completely forgot about that utility, which I have on my other computer. 

D) I know there is a partition, what I meant by there isn't one is that it's not showing a second partition.  Hm...  Looks like about half the drive is unformatted.

E) I don't think the drive was ever compressed.  I can ask the guy I bought it from, but he doesn't know a whole lot about the system itself.  He had it built for him, under the circumstances.  Looking at what the utility says about the BIOS, I take it back. It may need to be updated again.

[GX1_Man]

A) Then how would I load Windows XP when I only have an upgrade disk?

Boot with the XP upgrade disk. It will ask you early on in the install to insert the Win98 CD to verify you are upgrading.

B) I've only had the computer about a week. And the guy I bought it from is, literrally, blind.  Give me a break.

Thanks for the program link, though.  I completely forgot about that utility, which I have on my other computer. 

That's what it is for. What is the make and model of the drive?

D) I know there is a partition, what I meant by there isn't one is that it's not showing a second partition.  Hm...  Looks like about half the drive is unformatted.

When installing XP delete ALL partitions and repartition it however you want.

E) I don't think the drive was ever compressed.  I can ask the guy I bought it from, but he doesn't know a whole lot about the system itself.  He had it built for him, under the circumstances.  Looking at what the utility says about the BIOS, I take it back. It may need to be updated again.

We'll await your info.