Hard Drive Partially Formated

  • Thread starter Thread starter Calvin
  • Start date Start date
C

Calvin

I had trouble installing windows XP after using Norton
Ghost. Now only part of my 80 gig drive is formated
leaving 74 g's unformated and unusable. Need help to
make drive usable without reinstalling windows.
Thanks
 
Hi

You need 3rd party software e.g. Paritition Magic 8.0 to resize the C drive and/or add other partitions
Otherwise, boot from the XP CD, then delete the existing OS and then reformat and partition the HDD
Note: All data files will be lost in this case

Or, try go to disk management and check whether you can find the rest of the free space and then format and partition it to another drive
But in this case, you cannot change the size of the C drive

Pete


----- Calvin wrote: ----

I had trouble installing windows XP after using Norton
Ghost. Now only part of my 80 gig drive is formated
leaving 74 g's unformated and unusable. Need help to
make drive usable without reinstalling windows
Thank
 
Calvin said:
I had trouble installing windows XP after using Norton
Ghost. Now only part of my 80 gig drive is formated
leaving 74 g's unformated and unusable. Need help to
make drive usable without reinstalling windows.
Thanks
Click to expand...

74GB is the entire drive. All HD manufacturers take a GB to be 1 billion
bytes - whereas in computer language it's 1,073,741,824.


There are two definitions of a KB (that's kilobyte). A hard drive
manufacturer defines it as 1000 bytes, but the computer's value is 1024
bytes (this is because it's 2 to the power of 10 - that's 2 multiplied by
itself 10 times. Why 2 to the 10? Because 1024 in binary is 1 followed by 10
zeroes - also 10 converted from binary to decimal is 2).

Anyway, I digress...Back to your 'problem'. Look at the definitions below: -

Manufacturer (Decimal) Sizes
-----------------------------------

Kilobyte (KB) = 1000 bytes
Megabyte (MB) = 1000KB
Gigabyte (GB) = 1000MB

Computer (Binary) Sizes
----------------------------

Kilobyte = 1024 bytes
Megabyte = 1024KB
Gigabyte = 1024MB

Now look at the maths below

A decimal GB = 1000x1000x1000 = 1,000,000,000 bytes

A binary (what the computer 'sees') GB = 1024x1024x1024 = 1,073,741,824
bytes

Now you have an 80GB drive.

The manufacturer will tell you that your drive is 80,000,000,000 bytes. Now,
as you can see from the above figures, this cannot possibly be true.

The true value is 85,899,345,920 bytes or 85.9GB to one decimal place. Now,
this couldn't possibly fit on a drive of 80,000,000,000 bytes, so we have to
subtract 5.9GB (the difference) from the manufacturer's 80GB to make it fit.
This leaves you with an actual size of 74.1GB.

You can work out the true capacity of any drive by using this simple
formula.

The real capacity of any drive is the manufacturer's capacity less 7.5% of
that capacity.
 
I had similar problems using ghost, while some can use
it, on XP, I found that I can't. I have found that Drive
image 2002 works, with a workaround for SP1,
as far as making what you have usable, if you trust the
integrity of it, I'd use partition magic 8, it's a good
product, and can merge adjacent partitions.

otherwise, with 6 gigs, you may be better off
reinstalling & formatting to ntfs,

(yeah, I know it is a pain) I just got done restoring a
29 cd disk image on a hard drive, and using partition
magic on it, took about 5-6 hours...
Charles
 
Charles said:
I had similar problems using ghost, while some can use
it, on XP, I found that I can't. I have found that Drive
image 2002 works, with a workaround for SP1,
as far as making what you have usable, if you trust the
integrity of it, I'd use partition magic 8, it's a good
product, and can merge adjacent partitions.

otherwise, with 6 gigs, you may be better off
reinstalling & formatting to ntfs,

(yeah, I know it is a pain) I just got done restoring a
29 cd disk image on a hard drive, and using partition
magic on it, took about 5-6 hours...
Charles
Click to expand...

Did you not read a word I wrote?! No, of course you didn't or you wouldn't
have written what you did. He cannot recover 6GB because there isn't 6GB to
recover! 74GB is the *ENTIRE DRIVE*!! Please read the posts of those who
know a little bit more than you do before posting!
 
so now that we've decided that this is a friendly forum
that microsoft wants to send its customers to for free
support (first posts today), and we know all about the
hard drive size, how would calvin make his ghost image
file usable? since that was the real question.(at least
the way I took it to be)

tell him how to recover 74GB then, becuase if he restored
a image file to a drive & set no ther partitions up on
it, it should have the o/s, applications, data, and blank
formatted space on it.


cerridwen, feel free to respond to my post about hardware
changes & xp, I could use your expertise.
 
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