[oobrokensilence]

ok so i have a compaq laptop that was just reformated and somehow the D: drive was made the primary drive. the D: drive is leaving me 3.78mb of space on my whole hard drive. the c drive on the other hand has 72.2GB of free space on it. my question is...first how does this happen? and second (and more importantly) how can it be fixed?
If anyone could help me out i would be much obliged.
thank you,
silence

[Hybr!d]

It's not memory, it's called hard drive space.

[oobrokensilence]

lol. my bad. its just getting me all flustered!

thanks for the correction though.

[philthomas]

When you say "i have a compaq laptop that was just reformated" .... who reformatted it ?

From what you say, it souinds as though the drive has been partitioned, with 2 x partitions and the smaller drive has your Operating System installed on it .... is this correct ?.

If the drive was not partitioned previously, this must have been done as part of the reformat or possibly during installation of the Operating System.

If you want to change things back to 1 x partition only, this can be done, but the method will depend on what Operating System you have.
If you have XP, you will need a third party program, such as Partition Magic .... this will allow you to delete the empty partition and resize the one with the Operating System on.

Alternatively, if you dont mind installing XP again, you could delete the current partitions and create one large partition, at the beginning of the Installation wizard.

If you have Vista, this can be done from within Vista.

[oobrokensilence]

what ur saying seems to be whats going on...i was not sure of the technical name of it. i did not do the partitioning. it runs xpsp2 and i do not have a copy of the disk to reinstall windows so option one is sounding pretty good.

[philthomas]

Well Partition Magic isn't cheap, probably $70 your side of the pond, so if you paid someone to reformat for you, I would suggest complaining and getting them to put it right FOC.

[oobrokensilence]

so im guessing the trial verson from the website wont do the trick?

[philthomas]

I might be wrong, but I dont think a trial version is available for the latest version (8).
There was a non functioning trial available for vers.7, but It only allowed you to see how the product works, it didn't allow you to functionally partition your hard drive.

[oobrokensilence]

ok, its not my computer its a friend of mines moms so ill just have to see if she wants to buy an xpsp2 disk or if she wants to buy the partition magic program. thanks for the advice.

[philthomas]

You're welcome ...... Good Luck with it