I borrowed my 80G Seagate hard drive to a friend, I don't know what he did but it changed to 2.51G only. Even if we formatted it again and again still reads 2.5G only. The HD is kind of new, hardly been used. Any idea or suggesion would be highly appreciated.

Use the software available from the hard drive manufacturer. A CD should have come with the drive when you bought it...if not, go to the manufacturer's website & download it. Wipe out any partitioning, re-partition as you see fit, then format. You could probably do the same thig by booting on an XP CD. But play it safe...connect ONLY the 80GB HDD. And don't lend your HDD to anyone again...lol

EDIT: You could probably do the same thing by booting with an XP CD

Use xp's drive disk management mmc snapin. I read it wrong and answer it wrong too. So get off my case you goober.

Hi guys, Thanks for the suggesion. I've never installed any operating system on that 80G HDD, it was a slave ever since I bought. Anyways I will try to downlaod the CD from the manufacturer's site, or will connecting only it and use XP CD. jefro,I don't really understand, Can u explain a little bit, in the Disk managemnet, do I just format or delete partition and then format? It showed as 2.52G FAT32.

Slave or secondary drives don't require an operating system to be installed, just a file system (in other words, just partitioned & formatted) As stated by jam, you will need to remove the existing 2.5Gb partition (which is only using a fraction of the drive's capacity), and repartition it to its full capacity - either one 80Gb partition, or smaller ones if you wish - then format as needed. Lots of ways to do this, via disk management, or the XP CD tools or else those from the drive manufacturer - you just need to be careful you don't erase the wrong drive, so either pay very close attention, or play it super safe and just have the 80Gb connected I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an interpreter

Hi Guys, I installed "Disk wizard for windows" from the manufacturer's site, but the program doesn't want to start, don't know why. Then I connected the '80G' HDD only,and used XP CD, it read only one partition = 2.5G, tried to delete the partition, it said Max disk space 2579Mb. Anything I should do,or any suggestion? P.s I've never partitioned it b4, it was one 80G only.