15 gig hd. now 2 gig hd.

[crown711]

after a clean install my dear wife did . i now have only 2 gigs of a 15 gig hd.
what could have happened to 13 gigs? is there anyway to bring it back?
without the pain of reformatting?

thank everyone so much for this forum

[GDPurple]

Sounds like you could have formatted the drive as FAT16 rather than FAT32 hence the 2Gb limit on drive size.

To get back to the full 15Gb you will have to reformat the drive in FAT32 or use a disk utility such as Powerquest PartitionMagic to convert the drive to FAT32 and resize it to 15Gb.

[DeaJae]

if windows 98, just use fat32 cionverter, if 95 just put in win98 boot disk, run fdisk then say yes to large drive support, fdisk redas the drive size from bios if its set ot 2 gig in there then it will ask about large drive support.

[Kenteth420]

If the drive was partitioned as fat 16 which sounds like that is the problem you can use partition magic or some program like it to change over the partition so you can have the full capacity again, if you fdisk you'll lose everything again.

[Larommi]

Tried to delete but no button.

Could a mod please delete this.

Thanks

[Larommi]

if she just did a straight format with no switches and reloaded you should still have the same partition size and fat. Try a thorough scandisk and make sure the size is being reported correctly. The fat table could be corrupt.

However if she used a recovery disk some of the above posts are probably correct. You could run fdisk and see if it was partitioned fat 16 or 32. If it was partitioned fat32 then create your extended partition and run with 2/13gig split. Just install your programs on the "D" drive.

[Quiet Thunder]

Bios also may be the culpret, but I doubt it. I had a cpu I worked on where I added a 15 gig hd and Bios wouldn't read anything over 2 gig for some reason. I ended up having to use a util that Maxtor provided with the drive to by pass the bios and actually used a second bios for the hd. I thought it was definately a weird solution, but I wasn't going to complain. How old is the cpu? Doubt it will help, but it's a possibility.

[Chosen One]

Sounds to me like he had a smaller HDD at one time, and upgraded to the 15G. His wife may have used a resore disk which was looking for the old size. My suggestion is to repartition to correct size, format and load Windows from scratch. If all you have is the resore, then just try to find a Windows disk of whichever version you have a license for and use your license when it promps you for it.