acer laptop showing incorrect disk size.

joemardo1

Hi there,

I have an acer laptop came with windows xp with one hard disk of 80gb partioned into c (windows xp) and d data drive, with one hidden partition for backup.

I used partition magic to create another partition f but in xp it showed up with no drive letter though was able to be written to.

I was having problems with xp crashing so used a boot disk to get into fdisk options and deleted extended drives etc and then worked the other way to create new partitions, but the problem is it sees my total hard disk drive as only being 10gb. On using fdisk I deleted, logical, extended and finally primary drives first and then worked other way to create a primiary drive but when checking disk intergity it only sees it as 10gb . When I ran partition magic within xp it saw some bad clusters on the drive. Any help appreciated as to how I can make fdisk see my total drive space insead of just 10gb.


joe

albertross_2

which boot disk did you use?

joemardo1

Hi,

well I created a 98 boot disk but on cd rom as obviously no floppy on laptop. Same file system as the old floppy which enables me to get into fdisk options.

Well an update, I deleted the primary drive in fdisk but was unable to partition the full disk that way, so I restored with the acer recovery disk (which reformats the c drive) and drive c is now showing as 74 gb in windows . So I installed partition magic and created a further 2 partions d and e that way. I hope the lost space is probably the hidden recovery partition but I'm not sure if that is still there as I cant see it in computer disk management. Just as a matter of interest the Empowering technology that comes with acer laptops is it better to uninstall that as I could probably live without it?

joe

albertross_2

Microsoft and the HD manufacturer use a different definition of a GB..

Not a good idea to use 98 fdisk btw, disks were smaller in them days.

startrekker

joemardo1 wrote:

Hi,

well I created a 98 boot disk but on cd rom as obviously no floppy on laptop. Same file system as the old floppy which enables me to get into fdisk options.

Well an update, I deleted the primary drive in fdisk but was unable to partition the full disk that way, so I restored with the acer recovery disk (which reformats the c drive) and drive c is now showing as 74 gb in windows . So I installed partition magic and created a further 2 partions d and e that way. I hope the lost space is probably the hidden recovery partition but I'm not sure if that is still there as I cant see it in computer disk management. Just as a matter of interest the Empowering technology that comes with acer laptops is it better to uninstall that as I could probably live without it?

joe

The 74 gb is all you will have now as yes the hidden partition eats at the balance, i know i had an issue once usuing partition magic and when i needed to format the didk it said it had errors, a quirk i suppose. Looks like you are all sorted now

joemardo1

albertross wrote:

Microsoft and the HD manufacturer use a different definition of a GB..

Not a good idea to use 98 fdisk btw, disks were smaller in them days.

Thanks for that. If I don't use partition magic within windows to partition (which from my experiece in the past is probably only successful 50% of the time) what other good disk partition utility can you use with similar functionality to fdisk?

joe

albertross_2

partition magic is the best, there is a dos version included which you can use on a dos boot disk..

fdisk is destructive, it wipes existing data, so PM is better.

The 98 business is just that version only supports smaller HD's, (because that was all that was around at the time), the one built into XP install CD should be ok.

Gib_Gib

A 80gb hard drive is not an 80gb hard drive.

Windows classes one gig as 1024mb, where as hard drive manufacturers class it as 1000mb.