I had a total hard disc failure. Installed new one. After formatting it from Toshiba Product recovery discs which contain Win XP, I now have 2 local discs showing in My Computer. 'C' & 'D' local disk. C contains everything and D has only 1.5 mb out of 18.6 gb space used but shows nothing actually visibly on it.

Old drive was Toshiba 30gb, new one is Samsung 40gb

How can I reslove this?

Thanks in advance

In Windows Explorer or Control Panel,
click Tools in the Menu bar,
click Folder Options,
click View tab,
in Advanced Settings list, find and check mark
"show hidden files and folders"

Then see if files show on D.

Does that partition have a name like
system_sav(D:) ????

This is to be expected when you replace the original HD and then use the recovery disc to restore the OS. Drive D is created for recovery purposes only. Just leave it alone and forget it.

i_XpUser

go into disk manager and unassign the drive letter. you won't see it in my computer anymore and it will have no effect on recovery.

Give a person a fish you feed them for a day.
Ask a person to internet search and they learn a skill for a lifetime.

wanderer - that is interested. Curious - will the drive letter D be available for use for any other purpoose such as USB flash drive or is it put aside in Windows memory as a reserved drive letter?

i_XpUser

should be. all my my laptop restores resulted in hidden [no drive letter assigned] partitions. Seems to me if a recovery is required again its done from the cd anyway so a drive letter assignment in windows wouldn't make any difference.

Now if its reserved... I am still trying to figure out why I have network 1,2,3,4 when all I did was uninstall and reinstall a wireless card :-). I would suspect if deassigned with Disk manager that you can reassign it to another device no problem.

Give a person a fish you feed them for a day.
Ask a person to internet search and they learn a skill for a lifetime.

Hello & Thanks for all the replies.

As I said, new hard drive is 40g. Each local disc is 18.6g i.e equal in size. I could understand the re-installation from the original recovery disc may set aside a proportion of the drive for recovery, but surely not 50%. Any further views?

Cheers

50% is way excessive. I'm not familiar with the way Toshiba Satellite restoration works. Have you look up the knowledgebase at their site?

wanderer,

Thanks for your explanation regarding disk manager & drive letter :-)

i_XpUser