Possible mistake in harddrive set up cost me capacity?

Question

I've added a second 80 gig drive to my system, but i mistakenly set the volume capacity somehow at 31.5. Is there anyway to get the lost capacity back?

heres some clarification. The drive is a western digital eighty gig sSE. In disk management, the primary partition reads as 31.5 gigs. It is the ONLY partition of any kind on the drive. I have formatted the drive from to command line and the file system is FAT32. I'm Running XP Pro. No new drives were spawned to chunk up the additional capacity. As far as miss readin the capacity about that to, but it reads the same form the command line too.

Answer 1

The 65,536 Cylinder (31.5 GiB / 33.8 GB) Barrier

This barrier is relatively recent, and along with a couple of others began showing up during the spring and summer of 1999. Although this barrier is often referred to as the 32 GB barrier similar to the one immediately above, that description is a bit of a misnomer.

This particular barrier is caused by some versions of the Award BIOS not being able to handle drives having more than 65,535 cylinders. Most hard disk parameters use 16 heads and 63 sectors, which works out to a capacity of approximately 33.8 GB or 31.5 GiB. It is our understanding that on or about June of 1999, this problem had been corrected by Award. This is somewhat of an unusual barrier given that most, if not all, hard disks above 8 GB no longer use discrete geometry for access, instead Logical Block Addressing is used along with a flat sector number from 0 to one less than the number of sectors on the drive. No doubt this 65,536 cylinder problem must somehow be related to some older code that was being used, or a compatibility issue with older hard drives (or both). From everything we have been able to examine, this issue was limited to a few machines that relied upon old Award BIOS code that was subsequently corrected with an update.

Answer 2

Are you saying that you created a smaller partition by mistake?
Try this:

1) Copy the stuff that you want to save from your second drive, to your first drive. If there isn't enough space, then you'll have to do something like saving the files to a CD or DVD.
2) Click the Start button, and select 'Run...'
Type compmgmt.msc and press Enter.
3) Double click 'Storage' in the list box.
4) Double click 'Disk Management(local)'
5) Maximize the window, and you'll be able to see a listing of both your harddrives and the partitions on them.
6) Once you make a partition, you cannot resize it, unless you install and use a commercial program like Partition Magic. If you don't want to buy a disk partition program, you must delete the partition and then make a new one that's larger. If you created another partition on your second drive, you'll have to use something like Partition Magic. Otherwise, you'll have to delete that partition too.
7) Right click the drive partition you created on 'DISK 1' and select Delete. You can then use Computer Management to create a new partition on Disk 1.

Answer 3

You cannot format a volume larger than 32 gigabytes (GB) in size using the FAT32 file system during the Windows XP installation process. Windows XP can mount and support FAT32 volumes larger than 32 GB (subject to the other limits), but you cannot create a FAT32 volume larger than 32 GB by using the Format tool during Setup. If you need to format a volume that is larger than 32 GB, use the NTFS file system to format it. Another option is to start from a Microsoft Windows 98 or Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (Me) Startup disk and use the Format tool included on the disk.

Answer 4

check if there is a new drive (possibly labled F: or G:.) if so, that's where the extra storage went.

also, check that you are reading the screen properly. i often get mixed up too. the 31.5 may actually be the usage, not the free space.

Answer 5

What Brand hard drive is this? also make sure that you have your jumpers set right, there are some drives that depending on jumper configuration it caps the drive at that specific size. sounds like a crappy drive anyways, like an IBM.

Answer 6

Do you have multiple "drives" partitioned into it?

You may be seeing only one of the partitions if you did.

Answer 7

Re-boot.

Hit the proper seqauence of key(s) to get into the SETUP menu.

First one is drives, set that drive to "LBA". Save and Exit, reboot.

Answer 8

reformat and undo the partition or create a new partition with the remaining space.

Answer 9

yes, yes