Windows 7 & HDD size issue

[jmacavali]

I have loaded Windows 7 onto my desktop. It's an Acer, but I can't remember what type (I'm not at home right now). It has a 160 Gb Sata HDD in it but Windows 7 only sees it as a 20 Gb HDD. Needless to say, I've already filled it up, not realizing until it had only 700 Mb left that it wasn't reading all of the drive. I haven't tried to much to fix it yet but here are my thoughts. Please add any ideas you have or which of mine is most likely.

1. Go into the BIOS and change the way the SATA is configured so it uses the "old" style of communication. I forget what this setting is called...

2. Look for drivers on Acer's website. UPDATE: None are available for Win 7.

3. Use an external HDD.

4. Reload it again with Win XP.

 

[The_Lucas]

Maybe you made a mistake while partitioning. Type "Disk Management" into the Start Menu and press enter. Take a look at Disk 0. If there's a lot of black area (unallocated space), problem solved.

 

[GibsonSGKing]

Maybe you made a mistake while partitioning. Type "Disk Management" into the Start Menu and press enter. Take a look at Disk 0. If there's a lot of black area (unallocated space), problem solved.

Yeah, see if you can't expand the partition.

 

[jmacavali]

Pretty sure I didn't partion anything. I'll double check though.


EDIT: No partions....

 

[jmacavali]

Nothing in the BIOS to indicate the settings are wrong. In fact, the BIOS recoginizes the HDD as 160 GB (it's true size). This tells me it's a Windows thing. Any more ideas? In about 2 days I'm just going to have to reload XP on it if I don't get any suggestions.



EDIT/RESOLVED:

After some more googling I was able to determine the issue. It does seem as if I created 2 partitions (one for Windows and one for storage). I don't remember doing this so whether it was intentional or not I don't know. However, the biggest problem was that Windows 7 doesn't assign a drive letter to the extra space. I had to right-click My Computer>Manage>Disk Management and manually assign a drive letter to the space. It nows shows up fine. I don't know if this is a problem with Windows 7 or if it's something I did wrong (I've only loaded Win 7 like 3 or 4 times). Anyway, problem solved.

 

[dude_56013]

Well, I've never encountered that problem with W7 but my guess would be that you MAYBE partitioned the disk and then only formatted the first one (Windows partition)? I've never experienced W7 not assigning a drive letter unless the partition isn't formatted.

 

[thompatry]

I think in disk management you change the size of the OS partition. This is only possible in Windows 7. Correct me if I am wrong.

 

[jmacavali]

Well, I've never encountered that problem with W7 but my guess would be that you MAYBE partitioned the disk and then only formatted the first one (Windows partition)? I've never experienced W7 not assigning a drive letter unless the partition isn't formatted.

That is probably what I did. I work as a network tech at a school so all day long I'm loading/fixing computers so my home computer gets ignored (I'm tired of fixing computers by the time I get home ). I needed to get it reloaded because it was slow and just time to get rid of Vista. I rushed through the install and probably hit a few wrong buttons. Or I might have been thinking about doing 2 partions and forgot to format the second one once I created it. (<-- that is most likely what happened)