Hard Drive Not Recognizing Full Size?

Question

My hard drive is supposed to be a 250 GB, but the computer only recognizes it as a 127. Is there anyway I can fix this, preferably without losing all my files? Also I would prefer to have a step by step, rather than a bunch of computer talk I don't understand.

Answer 1

The drive may have been partitioned wrong. It sounds like only (appx) half was formatted.
(windows xp) Go to start button/settings/control panel double click administrative tools then double click computer management then under Storage click on Disk Management the screen to the right will tell you how big your hard drive is and what part of it is partitioned.

Answer 2

It depends on the operating system and the BIOS. Some of them only recognize a maximum of 128GB as the Primary partition.

To see the whole drive (if you are using XP), go to Start, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management. You should be seeing the remaining hard drive as Unallocated. You can create partitions out of it by right clicking and assigning it a drive letter and the amount of disk space you wqant to assign to each partition. Or you can make it one partition. Once the drive letter is assigned, you have to format it using NTFS format to take full advantage of the operating system. I have three partitions. One for the operating system and applications. One for data files and one for downloaded software. If my operating system crashes, I will not lose any files or downloaded software.

Answer 3

Hello Ecotron,
Windows 98 had this tool called scandisk when I had a similar problem a long time ago, I just ran that and it straightened everything out. I'll check to see what the tool is called in XP. IM me if I forget to post it here. Ok whoops it is probabably bexause windows xp partitions a certain portion of your hard drive as a backup drive. Thus removing that amount of disk space from your hard drive space.