Missing Half of my Hard Drive! Please Help...

[octo8saktulos]

Ok so i ran a dual amd 4200+
windows media center
300gb hd(sata)
2.5 gb ram
2 dvd drives on an hp media center PC
(alot of audio prts etc, not important)

The Story

I attached a fiends internal hard drive (250 gb sata) and had my computer format it through windows. After the drive was formated i rebooted the computer and loaded a boot install cd for windows xp. Everything loaded and i selected the 250 gb hhd to install on. It then asked me to re-format, so i did a quick format, i was confuesed as to why it needed me to do it again. then the name of the hard drive changed to the name of my hard drive (the 300gb) and proceeded to quick formatt. It took about a minute and was done. I was fraking out. I decided to continue to install on my friends hard drive and loaded windows, loged online and got some data recovery programs. Pulled my important files and noticed they were only recognizing the drive as 130 gb big. i tried re-formating, using partition magic 8, and othe rsuch programs. I had no luck. The system BIOS shows it being 300 gb, but i cant find the other half of my hard drive. Please help! i just want the available space, i dont need to recovery anything more.

 

[Freestone]

Install XP Service Pack 1 or 2

See

http://www.48bitlba.com/winxp.htm

 

[Freestone]

Sorry, missed that you said the 300GB drive is SATA. My ealier post applies to IDE.

 

[wolluf]

You said the data recovery apps were only seeing 130GB - I presume your running from the XP installed on your friend's drive. What does disk management (run diskmgmt.msc) say about the 300GB drive? Is the 250 seen as 250? Was the XP install using a pre-SP1 install CD - because though Freestone rightly noted that SATA drives should be ok anyway - a number of motherboards can effectively treat SATA drives as having an IDE interface - which allows XP to install without additional drivers - so just wondering if that's the case here.

If none of this is of use, you may need to run a utility to write binary zeros to the drive so you can start again from scratch (eg, killdisk or some drive manufacturer's diagnostic utilities include this option).

 

[octo8saktulos]

ok, well i went ahaead and installed vista. The formatted space still equals a total of 130 but when i installed partition magic it showed the rest of the hard drive... thanks for your help, i will partition and get it back to normal