My Computer has a 40gb hard drive. However, on strting the computer up, I find that the space i can use is only 4gb. I checked on my bios to see how large my harddrive is. It came up as 40GB. So I bought partitionmagic 7.0 in an attempt to remedy the problem and recapture some disk space. I was suprised when the program told me there was no space on the drive to expand into. I know that i have the 40gb hard drive, but my computer refuses to acknowledge it. I am thinking about reconnecting my hard drive, but that would be a last resort for someone who has no experience of putting computers together. Any suggestions/solutions to this problem would be highly apreciated.

When you say the space you can use is 4G. Does this mean you right clicked on c drive properties and it says free 4 gig? What all do you have installed? If you have music or videos, memory gets eaten quite rapidly. When all else fails, beat the %*#$! out of it!!!

If you have a 40GB harddrive as shown in the BIOS but your C: partition is only 4GB you must have the remainder unpartitioned. What do you mean your are thinking of "reconnecting" your harddrive? Do you mean repartitioning? That may not be necessary. Use fdisk to view exactly what is going on with your harddrive. You are making no changes at this time so you can actually use fdisk from within windows if you like. Simply go to START> run> type fdisk. hit enter at the Y prompt, select option #4. The info now on the screen is your entire disk. If you have an option #5 then you have more than one harddisk. Post back EXACTLY what the screen says when in option #4

Hi sillysausage: I had a similar problem with an old (used 2.5gb) hard drive that I tried to setup for FAT 16 (2gb), well it formated O.K. till I tried to install DOS 6. When installing DOS had to reconfigure HD to complete install, when finished partition was only 230mb. I then used Partition Commander 5 (DOS boot floppy) to make drive FAT 32 & is now working O.K., I tried a Maxtor utilities boot floppy & it said HD was bad. You might also have a bad drive, try a utility boot floppy for your manufacture's drive to see if that's the problem. Good luck, Z