Windows only see's 127GB of 500GB!!

[theburan]

Yeah, it's nice having windows in a seperate place, on my computer I have windows installed on the raptor, and just chills there, but then most of my games, my music, and my videos all go on the other 2 hard drives, so I don't really have to back up much when I format and reinstalled. Although the games I'd probalby have to reinstall anyways, but there just isnt enough room for 10 games in addition to windows on that raptor... i sorta want to put windows on one of my bigger drives, and leave the raptor for just games, but I don't know how much windows will like me installing it onto a different hard drive, lol.

[Parker]

Thanks for all the ideas guys!

I'm going to try the Gparted program, because I really just want a full 500GB drive.

[screwballl]

I have used Gparted myself and it works quite well. I had to do this when my streamlined XP disc with SP2 got scratched and had to reinstall with original Version 2002 (not even SP1) and it only saw 127GB of my 320GB drive.

[theburan]

That is one of the reasons I like vista, since it has the tools built in to do it itself, instead of relying on a 3rd party tool.

[Carl Martin]

Hey Parker, am I right? Is Gparted unable to merge partitions? The only program I'm aware of that can do this is Acronis. (Merge function is not operative on trial version, so you either have to cough up $35 or wipe out the hard drive and start over.)

Carl

[PrOLifIC_onE]

I would say that it is not just ideas. I highly recommend having two partitions. There is no need to make it one large 500g disk just so you can say it is one 500g partition. It is wise to do what Screw said. You can put all your videos, pictures, music, backup files and other other special files in that second partition. You still have a 500GB hdd, just wisely split in two. the 120+ primary partition is plenty for all your installed programs. Because I will tell you, it is very likely that with in a year there will come a point where a virus or too many install/uninstalls are just going to bog your machine and a good thing to do is just wipe out that primary partition and reinstall XP. Then you can do that without having to move any of your saved data that you placed on the second partition.

Usually about once per year, I reformat my main partition and reinstall windows. This is not usually due to viruses, as I pretty smart about my surfing/installing habits, but I just do it as annual maintenance.

But if you already made it one partition then one day you will see what I mean. When you have something crazy happen and you can't even get into windows in safe mode and you have to take other actions to backup your special files, then you will understand that it would have just been easier to have all those files already on a second partition.