Help With Hard Drive

this happened a while back, but now I asking for help. Here is what happened. I have this 80 GB Hard Drive with XP on it. One day, I was doing system restore. I only did a one day restore and it took hours!! It froze so I manually shut it off. When I turn it back on, there is a blue screen. It said there was a critical error and the operating system had been shut down. I try reinstalling XP but I still get the same message. I gave up and put it on another computer as a slave drive so I could get my files back. After that, I delete everything on the drive, including the operating system. Ever since it says it only has 20 GB free space although the hard drive is empty. Im not going to waste 20GB so im still using it as a slave drive. Is there away to get all 80 GB back?

 

HEY KNOC!!!!!!!!!! HELP ME!!!!!!

 

.............*sniff*

 

since you deleted "everything" give it a format... there's probably hidden files which you failed to delete... and you shouldn't just click delete on stuff... ya gotta uninstall... so format and then reinstall windows as needed..

 

What do you see if you go to Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Storage Disk Management?

 

I "deleted" using the delete button, but, I cant reformat. Everytime I try to access an operating system, it says the operating system has shut down

 

Plug it back back in as a slave on that spare comp. Reformat the whole hard drive to NTFS if you want to use it as a storage drive.

 

umm, I just formatted it FULLY and I got all my space back. Im using it as a slave with XP on it so if my primary drive fails, This one still has an OS. I dont mind the OS, its only takes 4 GB

 

try to use Norton ghost and/or partition magic

 

lol i'm just surprised the comp. didn't explode on him!!!

 

Get this software called Partition Magic from Symantec Corp. PM lets you see all partitions type (linux, unactive, etc.) and format it to your desired partition.

You can boot PM from floppy and partition from there...

 

I dont need something like that