Expert: Ashit Gajwani - 8/1/2007

Question
hello, ive just got a new hard drive for a old, pentium 4 2.8 computer, has a gig of ram in there, and a new 320 gb hard drive, i just installed windows and got it working and i realized that the space was only 120 gb, and way to small, have i set it up wrong, can you help?

Answer
Hi Chris,

The total space available on a hard drive is stored in a file called the FILE ALLOCATION TABLE, which is stored in the boot area of the disk. The following could have caused the lost space:

(1) Unformatted partition of which you might yet not know
(2) While partitioning you might not have used the entire space
(3) While formatting the BIOS did not recognise the full capacity of the disk. It may not recognise disk sizes above 120 GB at all.
(4) A corrupted File Allocation Table

I suggest you start from a scratch, wipe the disk clean using killdisk available free from killdisk.com and then go for a clean format.

Cheers,
Ashit