Missing hard drive space

Mattie

I just bought a new 640GB hard drive. I installed XP Home Edition on it without any Service Packs then immediately upgraded to Vista. After downloading every update available for Vista my Hard Drive is still showing a max of 130GB available instead of 640GB. I know people had similar problems with XP before service pack 1 but those service packs will not instal with Vista.

Is there a simple way to fix this without having to start from scratch again, install XP and the service packs and then upgrade to Vista?

wunderbar

you should be able to resize the partition using disk management in vista. Right click on my computer and go to "Manage"

Go into the disk manager and use the tool there to re-size the partition.

For the record the reason XP before SP1 could not see more the 128GB is because of an OS limitation, so when XP is installed it creates a partition that goes up to the max size it can do. installing a service pack, or upgrading to vista will not make the HDD space magically appear in the partition.

Mattie

I was able to opn up the partition for use, thanks. Is there a way to combine the 2 parts? Or will it not matter if I install progams to the larger partition even though it doesn't have windows on it?

Phoenix-D

You can use the other partitions for storage space just fine.

If you want to combine them the easiest way to do that is to delete both partitions, then install Vista directly. Vista will usually see all 640 GB straight off, which XP won't do.

If you have the upgrade edition of Vista, install Vista then upgrade using the same install disc. Yes, its silly as fuck. But it does work.

ronya

Back in Disk Management:

delete one partition. Then resize the other one (I think it's "Extend Volume"?) to take up the freed space.