Question About Harddrive Replacement

[Ragamuffin86]

This is probably a bit of a stupid question, but I'd rather be safe than sorry.

Anyway, a few months back during what I assume was a botched reformat I lost about 50% of my HDD space. I couldn't find a way to get it back, and I didn't have the money to replace the HDD so I just carried on as normal. Now though, it's a bit of a problem, even using an external HDD for my music, videos, etc, I'm now down to about 14GB on my internal HDD and that's not going to last much longer. I've got together enough cash at the moment to replace the internal HDD and get a copy of XP Pro (currently using Home), but I also want to upgrade most of my system within about 6months, change from a Athlon x2 3800 to a Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 among other things. My question is if I replace the internal HDD and OS now with my old system, will I still be able to use it when I change MB, CPU, GPU, etc, in about 6 months or will I have to buy a new system HDD and OS again?

Thanks in advance.

[badass]

This is probably a bit of a stupid question, but I'd rather be safe than sorry.

Anyway, a few months back during what I assume was a botched reformat I lost about 50% of my HDD space. I couldn't find a way to get it back, and I didn't have the money to replace the HDD so I just carried on as normal. Now though, it's a bit of a problem, even using an external HDD for my music, videos, etc, I'm now down to about 14GB on my internal HDD and that's not going to last much longer. I've got together enough cash at the moment to replace the internal HDD and get a copy of XP Pro (currently using Home), but I also want to upgrade most of my system within about 6months, change from a Athlon x2 3800 to a Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 among other things. My question is if I replace the internal HDD and OS now with my old system, will I still be able to use it when I change MB, CPU, GPU, etc, in about 6 months or will I have to buy a new system HDD and OS again?

Thanks in advance.

Not entirely sure what you are asking here, but I'll try to help anyway
If you buy a new HDD and XP pro now and use it as a new system drive, when you replace it with a Core2 duo, you will still be able to use the HDD and you should be able to get away with using your copy of XP, even if it is an OEM copy. You might have to phone MS and blag a bit to get it to activate again though.

The way I would go about things is:
Buy New HDD and XP Pro
Disconnect old drive from system.
Fit New HDD in its place.
Install XP pro, get up to date etc.
Connect the old HDD up to a spare slot on the motherboard.
Copy what you need from it to the new HDD. Format the old one properly so you get its full capacity.
Enjoy for a bit.
When you buy your new bits:
copy your stuff from your system drive that you installed XP on to the old one.
Disconnect the old one.
Fit all of your new bits and connect the newer drive.
Format it and install XP pro. etc.
try to activate - if it doesn't work, phone MS and try a blag. It should work.

[0iD]

You may not have lost the space at all, it may just not be recognised by XP. Go into control panel, admin tools, computer management, storage, disk management. Have a look at what the drive map shows you. It may well show a great wad of 'unallocated' space, which you can format, make active & use.

[Ferral]

You can also do what 0id has mentioned with a program called partition magic. Whichever you find easiest, personally I like PM for redoing my drives.

[Ragamuffin86]

Not entirely sure what you are asking here, but I'll try to help anyway
If you buy a new HDD and XP pro now and use it as a new system drive, when you replace it with a Core2 duo, you will still be able to use the HDD and you should be able to get away with using your copy of XP, even if it is an OEM copy. You might have to phone MS and blag a bit to get it to activate again though.

Sorry, badly worded, to put it simply if I were to get a new HDD and XP Pro to use in my current system, would I be able to take it out and put it in a new system I'll build later without too much problem, like clearing it and having to reinstall XP Pro on it? I was looking at getting a Raptor X for the system HDD and didn't want to fork out about £150 for one now, and then another £150 for another one when I start upgrading the rest of the system in 6 months or so.

You may not have lost the space at all, it may just not be recognised by XP. Go into control panel, admin tools, computer management, storage, disk management. Have a look at what the drive map shows you. It may well show a great wad of 'unallocated' space, which you can format, make active & use.

Sadly not, it's all there under the Primary Partition. I just have no clue where all the space went or how it happened.

[master811]

Sorry, badly worded, to put it simply if I were to get a new HDD and XP Pro to use in my current system, would I be able to take it out and put it in a new system I'll build later without too much problem, like clearing it and having to reinstall XP Pro on it?

If your building a new system it would be better to just do a clean install, either that or you'll have to repair windows after you've built it (which won't require a format, but will need re-updating), as windows probably won't like all the new hardware you've just added, and will most likely refuse to boot.

[Ferral]

When you reformatted the hard disc did you do it in a DOS environment? If you did then that will explain why you are missing half the space as DOS only supports upto a certain size. Try getting the disc manager from the website of the hard disc manufacturer. Then use that to boot up and hopefully sort the disc out.

[0iD]

If you install XP pre sp1 it won't recognise disks over a certain size on installation. If that's the case slipstream yor disk with sp1 & all the drivers you need.

Partition magic (recently sucked up by Symantec) is definately the tool to use, iirc you get a 30day free trial, failing that try Ranish partition manager http://www.ranish.com/part/.

[Zak33]

OiD is right. Very very right. Older versions of XP didn't see anything above (from memory) 120gig.

So people go out to buy a new drive to replace their original (lets say an 80 gig) ...buy a 160 or a 250 or bigger.....do everything right to install XP, such as booting off CD, choosing one partition, formating it and then installing XP...and end up with under a 120gig drive.

A good friend has done exactly that.... a later version of XP, as 0iD says, SP1 or later, will see ALL your drive and let you format it all.

[Ferral]

That ties in with what I am saying also as the XP installation starts off in a DOS environment. Use a program like myself or 0id mentioned to recover that unused space.

[Ragamuffin86]

When you reformatted the hard disc did you do it in a DOS environment? If you did then that will explain why you are missing half the space as DOS only supports upto a certain size. Try getting the disc manager from the website of the hard disc manufacturer. Then use that to boot up and hopefully sort the disc out.

Sorry, I didn't make it very clear, when I say I "lost" 50% (or so) of the space I mean the space is there, but something is taking it up and I can't find what, my Program Files barely take up 36GB and there's nothing else on the HDD that can account for that much space. And it's an SP2 version of XP.

[Ferral]

Try checking the size of your pagefile, also the indexing service that windows uses, try disabling the indexing service. Both can take up a fair bit of space combined. Also make sure you have deleted all temp files etc that arn't needed anymore. You can disable the indexing service and also do the disc cleanup from hard disc properties with the pie chart.

Not running XP and can't remember off the top of my head where the pagefile is except it is in system properties under one of the tabs next to the device manager. Try manually setting it to around 1.5Gb mark. I'd still try looking at the drive with something like Partition Magic or the Ranish program 0id mentioned if what I have said there doesn't do anything.

[Splash]

or you could try Treesize to establish what's eating your diskspace... The free version will be fine.

[Ragamuffin86]

or you could try Treesize to establish what's eating your diskspace... The free version will be fine.

Well, according to that I'm only using about 40GB, but there are two folders that come up Access Denied; System Volume Information and a profile folder in Documents and Settings from before I did the reformat.

[Splash]

I would strongly suggest if you have data left on the drive it has NOT been formatted...

The profile folder you cannot access because your account doesn't have a SID that valid for it. Can you take ownership of the folder and see what's in it that way?

[Ragamuffin86]

Edit: Never mind, I've got it and opened up about 80GB of space. Thanks to all for the help, sorry for wasting your time.