Hard drive is not showing full size anymore 1

[DellHater]

Hi
Recently had a virus problem on the PC, which casued a system crash. At the time of the crash I was running a virtual machine on another drive. Meant a clean reinstall of the OS on the main drive, not got a problem with that. But the drive that was hosting the VM has now lost over 50% of its size. Was 320 gig, now showing 137 gig.
I have deleted the partition and formatted, still no difference.
One of my system utilities (Tune Up 2009) has a disk doctor, ran that on it and no errors.

Anyone got any ideas or software suggestions that would potentially recover the full capacity of the drive ?

Thanks

Steve

 

[Lemon13]

what os/servicepack version?

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1026129864

M. Knorr

MCSE, MCTS, MCSA, CCNA

 

[DellHater]

HI

previously my system was vista.
have 3 drives
80G for OS
320G IDE (now showing 127G not 137G, sorry for misleading)
250 SATA

250 SATA and 80 G are fine, SATA did not lose any of its size or data on it.
when i installed XP back on 80G, ran SP's to SP3
when trying to open the 320G message said do I want to format the drive, couldn't do anything on it otherwise.

have tried the 137 Gig fix for 48Bit, no difference, as my displayed size is 127G i htink this is not the problem , may be wrong though as never seen this before.

 

[DellHater]

have just followed your link and checked atapi.sys version, by the looks of it i have the XP 64 bit version !!! how the hell did that happen !

as my system is 32 bit!

will try and revert back to the 32 bit version

 

[Lemon13]

for the 128gb problem

http://forums.techguy.org/windows-nt-2000-xp/594954-winxp-128gb-barrier-question.html

M. Knorr

MCSE, MCTS, MCSA, CCNA

 

[DellHater]

sorted thanks a lot !!!!!!

 

[DellHater]

the posts did mention merging, is that simply a case of deleting the partitions and then re-allocating ?

 

[Lemon13]

when windows/diskmanagment sees the full drive, yes

M. Knorr

MCSE, MCTS, MCSA, CCNA

 

[DellHater]

thanks a lot for your help, i have a full size disk again now !

 

[G0AOZ]

Just out of interest...

Some hard disk manufacturers have software tools which will allow you to return the drive to its full native size. I've successfully done this on an 160Gb Western Digital drive which showed up as 80Gb.

ROGER - G0AOZ.