HELP!!! could some one help me regain my hard drive space back. i formated my hard drive was having lots of problems i had XP Pro. on it a 80 GIG hard drive after i formated it it was only 2 GIG plus several partitions. could some one help me with this
would be so greatful have posted before but not much responce. i want to format and use Fat 32, it was Fat 16 or NTFS, Me is working good but very little space left to install any more software. Tommy

ME can't use NTFS for one thing. Formatting will erase whatever's on the partition for another, and using the fdisk partitioning tool is equally destructive.

You'd require something like Partition Magic or maybe Ranish to merge/convert partitions without losing data - and even those are not guaranteed

Life is hard; it's harder if you're stupid. -John Wayne

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The Windows ME boot diskette should handle the 80 GB drive without problems.The fdisk program can help you delete dos and non-dos partitions.Delete them all and reconstruct the partitions.Fdisk will ask to handle LBA partitions.Answer Yes to this question.Create one primary C drive set active for part of the size available(25% or 20 GB for example).The balance will be extended and then logical drives from the extended.You can again choose 25% or 20 GB for each next partitions of 20 GB logical and you end up with 4 X 20GB FAT32 drives.Install the system to C drive.Format the C drive if you wish(you can format the other drives from within Windows later on after setup is complete.XP setup will ask for conversion to NTFS and to format the C drive:it is up to you to decide but NTFS is a lot more stable in the long run.Good luck.

I got the impression he was no longer running WinXP.

At any rate - sure, if you don't need to salvage anything from the drive, use fdisk to remove the existing partitions and then repartiton as desired, format, reinstall

Life is hard; it's harder if you're stupid. -John Wayne

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