I need help with my hard drive.PLEASE!

[computerMan]

I bought a 200GB samsung hard drive off of New Egg. I recently was installing a game and it said that I have 8GB left out of 30GB. Can I fix this? It is a 200GB Hard drive. PLEASE HELP!!!

[Cricket]

What are the specs for your computer and what operating system are you using?

:) Cricket

[computerMan]

Specs:
AMD Athlon 3500 Clawhammer
PSU FSP(Fortune Source)/AX450-PN 450W power supply
ECS NForce4-A939 motherboard
Sony IDE DVD Burner
eVGA GeForce 7800 GTX
Two PQI Turbo 512mb RAM
Samsung 200GB Hard Drive SP2014n
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition with Service Pack SP1a


-Sorry I took so long to get back, I could'nt find the Thread. Thanks so very much!

[EzyStvy]

Is the drive the master with Windows on it?

Click on Start->Run and type Diskmgmt.msc and see what it says about the drive. Will probably see some unallocated space..

[computerMan]

It is Slave (the hard drive). What I saw was 31gb total and 8 free.

[Panama Red]

It is Slave (the hard drive). What I saw was 31gb total and 8 free.
Was that in Disk Management or My Computer? When you first installed the drive how did you format it?

[kilgoretrout]

If that's a FAT32 partition instead of NTFS, winxp imposes a maximum size limit of 32GB IIRC. If you want more than a 32GB partition, you should use NTFS. I think that's what Panama Red is driving at.

[Gizmo]

You can convert the current filing system to NTFS to see almost all the capacity. I say almost because you will need to install SP1 for XP to see well over 137GB. Type the following in the Run box:-

covert c:fs:ntfs

It will tell you that it will convert on the next reboot and ask you if you want to reboot. Go ahead and reboot. Please note that there is a small risk of data loss during file system convertions, so make sure you backup anything important first.

[anvil]

please explain ntfs for me. thanks

[Statica]

please explain ntfs for me.
A lot of details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS

[glc]

covert c:fs:ntfs

You need to do a bit better proofreading............

C:\>convert /?
Converts FAT volumes to NTFS.

CONVERT volume /FS:NTFS [/V]

volume Specifies the drive letter (followed by a colon),
mount point, or volume name.
/FS:NTFS Specifies that the volume to be converted to NTFS.
/V Specifies that Convert should be run in verbose mode.

C:\>

So, it's convert c: /fs:ntfs

This should also be done at a command prompt, not directly in the Run box.

Now, look carefully in disk management - is there unallocated space to the right of the 31gb partition on the bar graph, like maybe 155gb or so? Is the 31gb labeled as NTFS or FAT32?

[computerMan]

Yes, there is free 155gb. And it is labled NTFS. Thanks

[glc]

Now you have 3 choices. You can create a new partition in the 155gb unallocated space, or you can use Partition Magic to expand the existing 31gb partition, or you can wipe the drive and start over.