Where's my Pc's D drive gone?

xxdeebeexx

Hi I have reinstalled windows XP on a computer that I got from freecycle. The PC came without a hard drive so I have put one in, installed xp found all/ most of the drivers etc. I am now getting the message that I am short of disk space and now that I look I have no d drive.........

Where is it? How do I get one?

tia

dx

TakeThis

You don't need a drive. From whence did you get the hard drive? Of which capacity? Did you format to NTFS?

Hammyman

What was the letter D assigned to before, a partition or a DVD or CDROM drive?

xxdeebeexx

TakeThis wrote: »

You don't need a drive. From whence did you get the hard drive? Of which capacity? Did you format to NTFS?

It's my old HDD that I have been using for years, I think I tried to put a partition in when I was installing XP ie a c and d drive and probably got it wrong.

D was assigned to Data before

The file system is Fat32

I have used 8gb and have 1 gb free

Can I undo the partition to allow me to c=access the rest of the HDD?

thanks

dx

TakeThis

xxdeebeexx wrote: »

It's my old HDD that I have been using for years, I think I tried to put a partition in when I was installing XP ie a c and d drive and probably got it wrong.

D was assigned to Data before

The file system is Fat32

I have used 8gb and have 1 gb free

Can I undo the partition to allow me to c=access the rest of the HDD?

thanks

dx

Perhaps you should begin again. Delete all partitions, format(perhaps to NTFS) and create a partition and install to it.

It's a ridiculously small HDD, especially if you have already used 8GB.

xxdeebeexx

TakeThis wrote: »

Perhaps you should begin again. Delete all partitions, format(perhaps to NTFS) and create a partition and install to it.

It's a ridiculously small HDD, especially if you have already used 8GB.

Thanks, I thought that might be the only answer. I took ages to find all the drivers for the pc. If I back up my HDD will the new install be able to find the drivers from a memory stick? I have an external HDD that I can save things onto too.

I would like to make a partition so that if I need to do an install again then my data would be untouched. I have clearly done this wrong and wondered if this was a good description of what to do .

tia

dx

TakeThis

xxdeebeexx wrote: »

Thanks, I thought that might be the only answer. I took ages to find all the drivers for the pc. If I back up my HDD will the new install be able to find the drivers from a memory stick? I have an external HDD that I can save things onto too.

I would like to make a partition so that if I need to do an install again then my data would be untouched. I have clearly done this wrong and wondered if this was a good description of what to do .

tia

dx

Have you considered that your HDD is too small for your intended usage?
As to the Drivers...why would it take ages to find the Drivers? You just need to enter the Service Tag on the DELL website.

scheming_gypsy

Sounds like you've got a partition on the drive but you haven't gone into disk management and told XP what to do with it. But as already mentioned; 8gig is far too small for a system partition, a partition for the page file yep..... but not system files.

scheming_gypsy

TakeThis wrote: »

Have you considered that your HDD is too small for your intended usage?
As to the Drivers...why would it take ages to find the Drivers? You just need to enter the Service Tag on the DELL website.

she'd need to have a Dell PC for that to work

TakeThis

scheming_gypsy wrote: »

she'd need to have a Dell PC for that to work

I think it is a DELL.

A.Penny.Saved

That hard drive sounds far too small. Hard drives are fairly cheap so getting even a small one should cost very little. You might even manage to get a used one for only a few pounds or possibly free.

Get one with at least 80GB of space if you can. They are only around £10 on eBay and you might pick one up for less. Just make sure you find out whether you need an IDE or SATA drive.

You can install Windows from a USB drive if you have one of those but that would only speed up the install.

http://wintoflash.com/home/en/ orhttp://winsetupfromusb.en.softonic.com/

Having 2 partitions is a good idea because as you mention, it does make re-installing much quicker and easier because only the Windows partition needs to be re-installed and the data partition can be left untouched. But to do this you do need a drive of a reasonable size. It sounds like your is very small.

Windows needs to be installed to a primary partition, however a data partition can be a logical extended partition. It's better to use NTFS rather than Fat32. If you need Fat32 then make a small partition specifically for it after the data partition. Some things can only access Fat32, such as my Bios when saving settings.