Cannot see 30 GB

Hi deepthiji,

I would quess that "Quotas" have been set up on the drive.

On the machine in question:
Go to My Computer
Right-click on the relevant drive
Click on the "Quota" tab

Check if Quota Management is turned on.

Does that help?

>>Check if Quota Management is turned on.
no its not turned ON,, its off, that column is not checked

any other suggestions pleaseee

When you say he can't "see" 30Gb - where is he looking?

Try this:
Go to My Computer
Right-click on the drive you're referring to
Choose Properties

Can you please let us know what you've got for Used Space, Free Space and Capacity?
If your friend is referring to the amount of free space, then it's likely that there's something that's been added recently that is using up all the space.

Take a look at TreeSize - http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml - this will show you what's taking up the most disk space....

hi scampgb,
when he checked the properties of C drive, its showing only 5 GB ,,,
i will check the treesize link now and will get back
thanks

Showing only 5Gb total, or 5Gb free?

I think your best bet is to find out what his friend did to the computer.  It could have been anything :-)

Maybe your friend resized the hard drive down to 5gb with Partition Magic and the other 30gb is unformatted and unused.

Try right-clicking My Computer, choose Manage. Then expand the Disk Management tree on the left-hand pane. Look for the hard drive and you should be able to determine how large the partition for the C: drive is. If there is unused space (ie. the missing 30gb) you can use Disk Management to extend the existing partition.

>>Showing only 5Gb total, or 5Gb free

total 5 GB and used is arond 4.5 GB,, he had 35 GB....

>>Try right-clicking My Computer, choose Manage. Then expand

i asked him to check and its only showing 5 GB there in the Disk management..
ny other suggestions

If the hard drive is FAT32 you could boot off of a boot disk and run fdisk and that will show you what's going on with the hard drive!

its NTFS

I think FDISK will still work... it just will call the NTFS drive a NON-DOS partition... give it a try if you want.

I might be worth trying to use 'system resore' to set the computer back to a date before the problem occured.
The system resore utility is in programs (then system tools i think!)
I am not sure if this will help but it is definitley worth a go before trying other, more complicated fixes.
Good Luck

Can you just clarify something?  Go back into Disk Management (My Computer, choose Manage. Then expand the Disk Management tree on the left-hand pane).
In the bottom part of the right-hand pane, you'll see the various drives.
They'll look like:

Disk 0
Basic
37.25Gb                            <========= What is this value?
Online

CD-ROM 0
CD-ROM (D:)

No Media


If the value above is 5Gb, then that's all the OS is seeing as the capacity of the drive.  Playing around with Fdisk isn't going to help with that.

If this is the case, reboot the machine and go into the BIOS setup (usually you do this by pressing the DEL key).
Navigate to the bit that shows you the hard disk details, what does it say?

It could be that the size of the drive has been manually set to something incorrect.  However, that would generally result in the OS not working properly and can cause data corruption.

hi scampgb,sl1210  

dont have access to that machine now,, will check your comments and get back ,
thanks

I havent read the whole thread. Apologize if I am repeating someone.

Have you changed any BIOS settings? THere is one possibility that your BIOS has been altered by someone. Your BIOS is not allowing large disks to be seen by the OS. In that case, the DISK Manager will show the capacity of the disk as small. To verify this, enter the CMOS setup and see what capacity of the drive is being shown. If you see the capacity only 5 GB here, then you have to change the jumer settings on the HDD. Some old HDDs work in two modes - (a) Normal Mode, and (b) LBA Mode. In case your disk in one such drive, then you need to change the jumper sdetting so that it comes into LBA mode and your DISK is seen as a large drive.

Also, if in the BIOS your HDD's type has been set to "USER", note down the current settings and change it to "Auto" and then boot.

The other possibility is that, the BIOS shows it as a 40 GB HDD but OS identifies only 5 GBs. In that case I will suggest other altrenatives.

I had someone come to me with this question not too long ago.  He wasn't really worried about getting the system to recognize the space.  He was actually more worried about getting to the data that was on the 40 gigs he was supposed to have.  It was only showing around 500mb, and his woudln't boot.  

If you would like to try and access any data that might be on the missing space, you can access it using File Scavenger or similar data recovery programs.  Here is a site that has some of them listed (http://www.tech-pro.net/links_dr.html), or you could just do a search for data recovery.

If it were me, I'd do that and back up everything that I could, then I would make sure the BIOS settings were correct.  Then use Partition magic to be sure to create the right size partition before reinstalling.

There is software availble from certain HDD vendors to allow the OS to see drives of a certain size. I have tried this on a couple of different drives using the "large drive enabler" from the Maxtor website. It worked on other drives than maxtor.

If you want to do a data recovery, I suggest using Easy Recovery Pro. This app is free and it can recover all the data as long as the drive has not been overwritten completely. Should you have overwritten the drive, you will need to use a more advance recovery app.

hi, sorry for the delay,,
scampgb :
>>Disk 0
>>Basic
>>37.25Gb                            <========= What is this value?
here its only showing 5 GB,,

RanjeetRain :
>>If you see the capacity only 5 GB here, then you have to change the jumer settings on the HDD.
yes, in bois its only showing 5 GB,,

>>then you have to change the jumer settings on the HDD
i will try this and will get back soon
thanks a lot for the help guys

hi
RanjeetRain:
i checked the jumber settings and its alright, moreover my friend never messed up with the jumber, he never opened the CPU.
one more thing which i noticed is when i go to CTR+ATL+DEl > task manager> i can see only applications tab, nothing else, i can see which all application are open , thats all...
i cannot see the file, Options, view,  etc.. also i cannot see  process, performance, networking, etc.....
i ran spybot, adaware, and stringer in safe mode .... only spybot found some bad contents and could not delete it....

>>Change the jumper setting or enable the LBA mode to gain access to the entire disk space

what changes should i make,, and how to enable LBA mode?