Vista: Need help 137gb barrier

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XrayMan

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I installed Vista, and my Seagate 500gb will only go to 137gb. My Partition Magic does not work in Vista, and there is no update for it. Is there another way?
 

dblD

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Just so you know and just like a lot of the 'hard' braggarts that I know, they always say it is bigger than it really is, a '500 gigabyte' hard drive is really just 465 gigabytes.

I do not know how you got where you are now but you will probably need to delete any existing partition(s) on your 500G drive; then you can create a new partition containing all of the available space (it will be the default selection available when you create the new partition); then you just format the drive using ntfs and using the default block size. You should wind up with around 450 gigabytes available.

If it is one of your regular system drives you may want to go ahead and enable indexing. It may get busy for a while, every time you put something on it but that will only happen for a short time and then finding most thingies will be a lot faster.

If it is a data drive but not a system drive ( D:... ) you should turn on compression because you can usually put more in it. But if it is your system drive ( C: ) I would suggest that you do not turn on compression as with it being off, it will load system programs and libraries much faster. Also enabling compression on your system drive will most likely slow your page-file access down too much.

You probably should ask the others here as I too have really just started using Vista Ultimate and it may be a lot different from W2K and XP (but I don't think so).

Best
--DD
 

doctorx

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another possiblity:

Sounds like he hit the 137GB barrier with an older ide controller. The only option if that is the case, is get an addin controller... getting one that works with vista would be interesting though.
 

doctorx

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another possiblity:

Sounds like he hit the 137GB barrier with an older ide controller. The only option if that is the case, is get an addin controller... getting one that works with vista would be interesting though.
 

doctorx

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another possiblity:

Sounds like he hit the 137GB barrier with an older ide controller. The only option if that is the case, is get an addin controller... getting one that works with vista would be interesting though.

The other thing is this: dont make your c drive any bigger than 50G anyways... put the rest in a d: or more...

Example of my setup:
c: 35G
d: 250G (games)
e: 15G (mail and documents_
f: 100G (family pix and movies)
g: 400G
h: 45G (software)
i: 150G (music)
J: 463G (misc - no raid5)
k: 1TB (misc - raid5)
 
G

Guest

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I installed Vista, and my Seagate 500gb will only go to 137gb. My Partition Magic does not work in Vista, and there is no update for it. Is there another way?

Assuming it's not hardware related (IDE Controller), you should be able to resize it in 'Disk Management', which is in 'Administration Tools', 'Computer management'.

Vista was nice enough to include some extra disk management options. :)

There, you should have an option to 'Extend Volume' on the partition, which should show as having free space next to it.
 

XrayMan

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Septic, thanks for those tips . I got it all figured out, and all my hard drives show the fullsize of the drives. Also thanks to everyone else who replied. Everything is fine now, and I'm happy. :D
 
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