BleepingComputer.com: harddrive question !!

hello all,

i just put vista on my laptop with a new harddrive using the recovery disk. i'm used to xp and creating partitions but this laptop uses vista. vista is more automated at least when its an hp recover disk and did everything automatically. my question is that my harddrive is a 320 gb harddrive but only 24 gb availibility is showing after my vista install. please help!!

thanks
coby

OK, can you see the hard drive's properties in "Computer" (formally known as "My Computer" in Windows XP)
How many Partitions are on this Harddrive? how much of the drive is pink and how much is blue?

I forgot how many Gb of drive space Windows Vista uses for a full install as I'm one of those people who jumped from Windows XP Home to Windows 7 Home premium.

But I can not imagine it would use that MUCH space up, even if you installed ALL the add-ons and fonts!..no way....anyways I wonder if you have the drive's size configured correctly in the motherboards main BIOS menu.

Or if the motherboards BIOS supports a drive this big (meaning drive size barriers)

MrBruce1959, on Feb 3 2010, 08:56 PM, said:

no, my harddrive is showing 9 gigs used up out of 24 total gigs availible ... also, shouldn't be a problem with barriers cause the drive showed up properly when i had windows xp installed. i had to change to vista though because hp has not xp drivers for my video card

This post has been edited by cobyk: 03 February 2010 - 10:09 PM

Your absolutely sure this harddrive is a 320 GigaByte drive?
Its not a 32 Gb by any chance correct?
If it is a 320 Gb drive with 1 partition, your missing a whole 296 Gb of drive space there somewhere.

This post has been edited by MrBruce1959: 03 February 2010 - 10:39 PM

MrBruce1959, on Feb 3 2010, 09:31 PM, said:

yea, i'm very familiar with computer optimization and repair. been doing it since windows 98. i just bought a 320 gig to replace my factory one that crashed. xp recognized it as stated earlier, but vista did its own thing and is only showing 24 gigs total. im stumped and don't want to re do this thing again.

Hmmm? a Vista recovery disk?
Let me step back and take a think about this, while I let someone else attempt to help you.
Don't get frustrated, you came to the right place for help...sometimes another person who owns the same machine, who had the same issue, will pop in and offer you a quick solution that works. People are good about that here in the BC forums.

under the properties of the hard drive on the volumes tab i populated the drive to show the space on it. i'm getting that the drive is a master boot record partition style with a capacity of 305,xxx mb. this means it recognizes the total size. i'm also showing 280,xxx mb of unallocated space?? why did vista not allocate this space?? how can i allocate it??

When the disk was formated (before Vista was installed) was you given an option to set the size of the partition?
Did you allow the whole drive to be allocated as one partition at any point?

I know you said the drive was new, that there was no previous partitions made on this drive.

I'm not 100% sure about using recovery disks when installing to a new harddrive, because I've only used those to repair or re-install the O/S to the origional harddisk.

My experience has been mostly installing on an unformated harddrive an official copy of windows from upgrade disks or full versions of Windows o/s.

The only time I did do an OEM desk was installing windows2000 off of a Dell computer disk, but it was not a recovery disk, so my experience there is some-what weak.

But I love trouble-shooting problems like this.
If I have an answer I'll get back to you.

MrBruce1959, on Feb 3 2010, 10:25 PM, said:

thanks for your replies. i was able to figure it out though. i just used vista's disk management to allocate the rest of the drive to a seperate section.

Ok so you feel this issue is resolved then?

And by the way, your welcome!