[SOLVED] Problem with my new Hard Drive

[Rezurrr]

Hello. So I bought a new Hard Drive yesterday when my old 1TB one had a bluescreen of death and it died. I bought a 250gb since I don't need anything larger for the time being as I am planning to replace my PC, I fitted the hard drive and installed windows 7 on it, after starting it up for the first time, I've noticed that my memory was very very small, it was only 78GB from a 250GB hard drive, i know you're supposed to lose ~5% of disk space due to the way windows calculates space and the way manufacturers make the disks, but this is 70%, it's way too much lost space. What is up with this?

 

[DSzymborski]

Hello. So I bought a new Hard Drive yesterday when my old 1TB one had a bluescreen of death and it died. I bought a 250gb since I don't need anything larger for the time being as I am planning to replace my PC, I fitted the hard drive and installed windows 7 on it, after starting it up for the first time, I've noticed that my memory was very very small, it was only 78GB from a 250GB hard drive, i know you're supposed to lose ~5% of disk space due to the way windows calculates space and the way manufacturers make the disks, but this is 70%, it's way too much lost space. What is up with this?

Have you actually looked on the hard drive with something like WinDirStat to actually see what's taking up the space? Do you know for a fact this is actually a new, not a used, hard drive?

 

[brokeBuilder2019]

Hello. So I bought a new Hard Drive yesterday when my old 1TB one had a bluescreen of death and it died. I bought a 250gb since I don't need anything larger for the time being as I am planning to replace my PC, I fitted the hard drive and installed windows 7 on it, after starting it up for the first time, I've noticed that my memory was very very small, it was only 78GB from a 250GB hard drive, i know you're supposed to lose ~5% of disk space due to the way windows calculates space and the way manufacturers make the disks, but this is 70%, it's way too much lost space. What is up with this?

Open the Disk manager utility on Windows and see how many volumes/partitions are there on this hard drive. Are there any recovery partitions or anything like that ? Even if there are, those usually don't take up more than 10-20 GB.

What is the filesystem format of the drive ? NTFS, FAT32, etc ? This should not be the issue, but ...

WinDirStat, as suggested ^, is also a great tool to see what's taking up space.

Like the other guy said, are you sure this is a new drive ?

 

[Rezurrr]

I honestly don't know if it's new, I went to a store that specializes in computers and I bought the hard drive there with the employee fitting the hard drive on for me, I'll try to find anything I can with WinDirStat, thanks! Oh and can I somehow recover my old 1TB hard drive? I have some important documents on it

 

[brokeBuilder2019]

Oh and can I somehow recover my old 1TB hard drive?

The easiest way would be to buy an external enclosure or USB adapter cable and connect it to your PC, as you would connect any other USB flash drive. It should then show up as a drive and you can browse it in Windows File Explorer. Assuming the drive itself hasn't died.

How big is your old drive ? Is it a 3.5 inch or 2.5 inch drive ? Is it a SATA or IDE (unlikely) drive ?

^ That will determine what kind of enclosure or cable you need.

 

[Rezurrr]

It's a 3.5 inch SATA Toshiba drive.

What is the filesystem format of the drive ?

It's NTFS, I've checked and I found 2 primary partitions which have a combined total of 110 GB, which leaves me with 120 GB of unallocated space .

 

[brokeBuilder2019]

It's a 3.5 inch SATA Toshiba drive.
It's NTFS, I've checked and I found 2 primary partitions which have a combined total of 110 GB, which leaves me with 120 GB of unallocated space .

Ah, so one of those partitions is the problem. But then, the question is - how did that second one get there ? Sounds like a used drive.

Anyway, if you didn't create that 2nd partition, go ahead and delete the volume using Windows Disk management, leaving the primary Windows partition intact. That should create the space you need.

P.S. Something like this should work to connect your old drive to the PC:
https://www.amazon.com/ORICO-Toolfr...3.5+inch+sata+enclosure&qid=1574092857&sr=8-3

 

[Rezurrr]

Thanks, I've extended the volume of my C: drive into it's full potential, now I have all 232 GB available!