Hd showing smaller size

I was trying to prepare my Hd to format and re-install win xp pro using one of the utilities from seagate like I always do, the utility is call disk wizard.
By mistake trying to make a partition I click in something that made my hard drive smaller, now is only 33000mb (33gb) instead of the 80000mb (80GB).
I saw in the bios and say 33gb also when I start the win install say 33gb.
I tried everything to restore it using this utility from seagate by I can not do it.
Would you please help me with this?.
Thank you beforehand for your help and time

install partition magic or acronis partition manager (i think that's the name) and use it to resize the partition.
you just open the program>right click the partition>click "resize">drag the bar to choose a size (or type the number of mbs)>click apply and the computer will most liely restart and apply the settings (sometimes it can do it from windows).

Have you already installed Windows onto the 33GB partition?
If so...
Go to Administrative Tools>Disk Management.
That should show you the HDD with the active (Windows) partition and the remaining space as unallocated.
Simply format the unallocated space and you're done.
If you want to rearrange the partition sizes (or combine them), Partition Magic would do the trick.

I'm having a different variety of this problem:
Both the specs on the HDD's and the BIOS says the HDD's should be 300 GB
However, neither Windows nor Partition Manager seems to agree with this. They refuse to let me see more than 284 GB, either ways.

:frusty: :helpsmili :frusty:
TIA

Quote:

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Originally Posted by true_neo

I'm having a different variety of this problem:
Both the specs on the HDD's and the BIOS says the HDD's should be 300 GB
However, neither Windows nor Partition Manager seems to agree with this. They refuse to let me see more than 284 GB, either ways.

:frusty: :helpsmili :frusty:
TIA

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ya you lose a bunch of GB's for formatting and bad sectors and because manufacturers count a mb as 1000kb (but they're actually 1024kb) and count a gb as 1000mb (actually 1024mb). so it alll adds up to a few gb's lost in the end. ;)

edit: you lose around an average of 6gb for every 80gb.

Well see, they are spanking new. I had actually not formatted the second HDD (I bought two) before installing PM.
I've never had this issue to this severity with the IDE disk (these are SATA), I formatted the IDE a bunch of times but still only lost 8 GB :P
So it must be Maxtor not being able to count computer numbers ;)

It's the same with hitachi/ibm and WD. At least with my drives. :unsure:

I thought almost every hd manufacturer counted the same way.

All hard drives don't show full capacity after they are formatted. It's the way the file system allocates the space. The amount of space "taken away" depends on the chunk size used. Heck, my 250GB Maxtor was actually 251GB before it was formatted. After the format, it went down to 233GB. This is normal. don't worry about it.