40GigHD But Recognized as 10Gig! Please Help.

[chau_ya]

Hi all,
I need your help very much. The C drive in my home system is a 40Gig HDD and it has a lot of junk files in it. I wanted to make it into 2 drives (10 and 30Gig). I did the FDish from the boot disk and reformat the whole thing. I think I did something very incorrectly.
Now my system ended up with a C drive and it has only 10Gig.
I need all the help from you to recover the lost partition.
I appreciate it. Please be clear on your instruction as my skill level on PC is very limited. Will try to fix it tonight.
Thanks.

 

[camieabz]

Well...

First go into fdisk.
Select 4 and confirm the partition status.
Normally in your case it would say something like

C:1 A PRI DOS Volume Label 40Mb FAT32 100%

Now firstly regardless of anything else, it had better say FAT32. If not you need Win95b or newer.

I'm guessing your drive says something like

C:1 A PRI DOS Volume Label 10Mb FAT32 25%

If this is so, you need to create an extended partition for the rest. Escape out of partition info and press '1', '2' and allocate *** 100% *** for it. It will allocate 100% of the remaining space.

This done, you will need to set the partion as active.
From the main menu it is '2'

Let me know if I am close.

<b>
Heatsinks, fans & whisky...Everythings Cool!
</b>

 

[chau_ya]

Hi Camieabz,
Thanks for the instruction. I'll give it a try tonight and let you know how it goes. Yours is very clear.

Some body at work told me today that I could do the FDisk INSIDE Windows kernel. Is it true or not?

Regards,

 

[Spdy_Gonzales]

I don't think so. Use fdisk from the floppy boot disk. Don't forget to format the new d: drive. If you plan to install windows in the 10G C:, then you want to make that the active partition before you quit fdisk.

<b> "Shyt" HAPPENS </b>

 

[camieabz]

Whoops!

I didn't actually specify that the PRIMARY partition should be set to active.

I the past I asked colleauges (I can never spell that word) about partitioning from Windows and they had never tried it.
Most advised against it. Some programs like Partition Magic supposedly can, but I've never used them.

<b>
Heatsinks, fans & whisky...Everythings Cool!
</b>

 

[chau_ya]

Hello Cami and Gonzales,
Thank you both for helping. I'd like to report what happened last night with my formating issue.

Previously you said "I'm guessing your drive says something like:
C:1 A PRI DOS Volume Label 10Gb FAT32 25%"

And you are very close. But it showed c=100%. So it means
the rest of the HDD space is in the nowhereland.

I just went ahead and re-do the Fdisk all over again. And
things looks much better. Since this is the second time doing this, it went faster.

Thank you all. You guys are great.