Format resulted in a loss of many GB's

Some days ago I formatted my friend's pc since it contained Vista and he referred to have XP on it.

All went successful, except for the intern hard drive. It went from about 120GB to 17GB capacity. And there is only about 1 GB available of space.

Is anyone familiar with this issue?

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Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/Nibgames

You probably installed XP to the 10GB recovery partition on the hard drive. So you really didn't format the drive entirely. You can right click on my computer -> Manage -> Disk storage and see the partition lay out. I would re-install XP from scratch again, then format the entire drive, not just the last partition.

I would stick with vista or windows 7 though. Most of the time the manufacturers don't make XP drivers for a lot of the hardware (it sucks, but it was their way of phasing out XP), HP is notorious for doing this. And you can't have a computer that doesn't recognize its own network card.

You can use a live USB or CD of something like Ubuntu to manage your partitions much better, it has a couple, GPart and they're built in Disk Utility. GPart will show you all partitions on the system and allow you to muck with them. Disk Utility will allow you to view the health of the drive, in detail. It has all the SMART data listed (if you have it turned on) You can look at things like .... failed reads (important even if the disk is healthy)

I'm curious ... why you were formatting at all ... I can't really think of many reasons you'd want to format your drive explicitly. When you install an OS, it will format the partition you've made.

Anyway, you can use something like GParted to see ALL of the partitions available. However, I would suggest making more than one partition for the system. I know a lot of people are like, "but but, all the free space", but honestly it will save you headaches later.

Make a partition on the drive just for the OS. XP needs a partition of something like 5-10GB, Vista and 7 needs one that's about 40GB (Almost 20GB is swap!! Jesus Christ!).

The idea is you have a partition where the Operating System and ONLY the operating system is installed, including updates and all that. ANY additional software would be installed on a different partition (which you can separate out if you want, or just make the remainder of the disk the partition)

This will not only make Windows run faster (You'd be surprised how often it scans the entire file system), it will save your ass if the OS gets funked up, since the data partition will, generally, stay untouched and is easily recoverable.

That's what I'd suggest doing. As for which to choose, that depends entirely on what the computer is used for.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Crono said:
You can use a live USB or CD of something like Ubuntu to manage your partitions much better, it has a couple, GPart and they're built in Disk Utility.

Hirens Boot CD is my choice of flavor. It comes with a ton of utility programs.

omegaslayer said:

Crono said:
You can use a live USB or CD of something like Ubuntu to manage your partitions much better, it has a couple, GPart and they're built in Disk Utility.

Hirens Boot CD is my choice of flavor. It comes with a ton of utility programs.

Thanks a lot everyone. Omegaslayer's tool did the job. The issue was simple, there was a partition installed of only 8GB space. So I made a new one with all the other space, so that Windows XP is installed on a different drive as Crono suggested.

I also changed the default folders for temporary files from the Windows partition to the new one.

Thanks again!

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Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/Nibgames

Windows Disc has a built in tool to format and partition the drive.

It's not very informative. And it will not delete manufacture made recovery partitions from certain manufacturers.

Also, it can fail easily.

If you're doing disk management you should leave it to software that actually works more than 60% of the time and is agnostic.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Maybe your doing it wrong.. have never had a problem. Oh yeah that's right your an expert, and I'm not.

Oh goodie. Another Muhnay snide remark. As if I didn't have enough of those already.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.