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Author Topic: hard drive capacity has vanished & reinstallation of Vista does not complete  (Read 2468 times)

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grandpa ken

    Topic Starter


    Starter

    Please excuse me if i mess up this is my first time submitting a question.
    My HP Media Center PC was running excellently until about 2 weeks ago, the PC is equipped with the Vista OS, it has a 500 GB hard drive. The anti-virus expired, i uninstalled the anti-virus and foolishly did not replace it (THAT will never happen again). I suspect that the PC is infected. I wiped the hard drive and uninstalled the OS, I did a reinstall from a new set of recovery discs. I performed the reinstall several times, each time after the last CD ejects and the PC is in the process of rebooting it hangs up (blue screen, one of the messages says "don't touch or move the PC while it is rebooting". It never completes the process,one night just to make sure that I was'nt being impatient, I left in on all night, no change). I can remove the blue screen by Ctrl-Alt-Del. From time to time I get a pop-up saying that the PC is infected. Another problem that I am trying to resolve is the loss of capacity on the hard drive.  HP's Tech Support guided me through a hard drive test, it passed. So the 450 GB have vanished!!!!! I did not know that was possible. The PC now indicates that the "C" drive 48.8 GB & "D" drive 9.76 GB, I don't know what to do to fix either of these problems. Please let me know what you suggest.  Thanks

    Allan

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    It does not sound as though you've actually formatted the hard drive before reinstalling the OS.

    grandpa ken

      Topic Starter


      Starter

      So when i installed WipeDrive it indicated that my Drive 1: 500.11Gb. When i installed recovery disc 1 i thought that one of the steps during the installation process was for the software to partition the HD. If this is wrong how do i find the missing partition  capacity? I am not familiar with  partitioning, what do i need to do? Thanks for your advice and time.