Vista - Hard Drive Issue

I recently installed Vista Home Premium and one of my hard drives is not showing all the space that it use to. The hard drive in question is a 1 Tb hdd and was working fine in XP as were the other HDD's. When I installed Vista, all the other disk's worked fine except for this one. I have gone into Computer Management and it shows the drive as having 859 Gb of unallocated space that I cannot format. I am unable to create a New Simple Volume or any other volume types for this drive.

Can anyone help me with this? Do you need more info from me?

Thanks everyone.

To troubleshoot this issue, I need to confirm the following points:



1.Can you access the old hard disk? How many partitions have you divided?



2.Can you see the new hard disk in Disk Management?



3.Before allocating letters, did you have the new hard disk scanned or
formatted?



Generally, the reason why you can't allocate letters to a new hard disk is
due to any of the following status.



1.Unavialble letter is used to allocate to the new hard disk. Generally, you
can assign letters from C through Z, A and B is usually assigned for floppy
disk. Moreover, you can't use letters which are already assigned for the
older disk. For detail steps on how to allocate driver letter to the new hard
disk, please visit the following website.



How to allocate drive letter with Disk Management in Windows Vista



2.The hard disk has bad sectors or lost clusters. You can download Data
Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows by visting the following website and
perform a test.



http://support.wdc.com/product/downl...&sid=3&lang=en



Note: Please follow the instruction listed on the above website.



3.The new hard disk is RAW, you may need to format it before assigning
letters.



4.Hard disk is damaged. If you connect both the SATA and the legacy ATA
power cable to the drive at the same time, this may result in damage to the
drive. Thus you can't access hard disk any more. In this case, I recommend
that you contact manufacturer for support.

Good Luck!

--
Computer/Software Tech.

Make it a great day!

Charles Richmond




"Koflach" wrote:

Also to add this link:
http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Win...110521033.mspx
--
Computer/Software Tech.

Make it a great day!

Charles Richmond




"THE C. [MSFT MVP]" wrote:

Hi, Koflach.

You do mean Disk Management, right? My favorite way to run DM is to press
Start, type "diskmgmt.msc" and press Enter. When I enter Disk Management
through Control Panel | Administrative Tools | Computer Management | Disk
Management, not only does it take more effort, but then its display has so
much other information using up the screen real estate that I feel like I'm
working laparoscopically - or through a keyhole. :>(

You know, of course, that 1 TB does not equal 1,000 GB. Because of rounding
and converting binary and decimal numbers, my 1 TB Seagate starts out with
931.51 GB, per DM. How many GB did your drive start with? That number
should be in the left-hand column of the Graphical View in DM.

Tell us about existing partitions on that HDD: How many partitions and how
large? Were they created and formatted in WinXP, or in Vista? Do they show
anything in the Status column other than "Healthy"?

Is the color bar over the 859 GB colored Black for Unallocated, or Green for
Free space? The terms sound synonymous to me, but DM seems to indicate that
there is a difference - although I haven't found the difference explained in
the Help file. I note that the only "Unallocated" space shown in my system
is the 8 MB at the end of my USB ReadyBoost flash drive, which I understand
is reserved for system use. All the areas outside any partitions on my HDDs
are labeled "Free space". So, just in case it does matter, what does DM say
about your 859 GB?

The Help file in Disk Management has a full page on "Move Disks to Another
Computer". Perhaps something in this page will hold the clue to your "can't
format" problem.

Please post back and let us know how this works out for you.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
rc@xxxxxx
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8064.0206) in Win7 Ultimate x64 RC 7100

"Koflach" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:b264e80489324d9e16a456e13117e96e@xxxxxx-gateway.com...

Has nothing to do with the OP's issue . Still trying to pretend that you are a MS
MVP and on top MSFT posting via the Web interface

--
Peter

Please Reply to Newsgroup for the benefit of others
Requests for assistance by email can not and will not be acknowledged.

"THE C. [MSFT MVP]" <THEC.@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:E9393474-FC95-44C5-B949-73A90485D60D@xxxxxx

RC

Wondering if the OP formatted that HD originally in Fat32

--
Peter

Please Reply to Newsgroup for the benefit of others
Requests for assistance by email can not and will not be acknowledged.

"R. C. White" <rc@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%23N6w$9Y1JHA.5772@xxxxxx

Peter Foldes wrote:
No harm comes from it.
Most don't care who answers their question.

Count to Five and Twenty.

Free space is unused space within a partition.

Unallocated space is that which is NOT partitioned - but can be, or can be
added to an existing partition

--

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP
Windows Desktop Experience


"R. C. White" <rc@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%23N6w$9Y1JHA.5772@xxxxxx

Hi, Richard.

I agree with you - but my Disk Management doesn't.

Or maybe it does, now that I take another look. My Green-bar Free space is
all within the Extended partition (on each drive), but outside any logical
drives in that EP.

Thanks for the reminder. I'm sure that I USED TO know that. ;^}

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
rc@xxxxxx
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8064.0206) in Win7 Ultimate x64 RC 7100

"Richard Urban" <richardurbanREMOVETHIS@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:uAWNlib1JHA.1416@xxxxxx

Thank you everyone for your replies to this thread. I used the above solution and it worked like a champ. Vista now recognizes the drive after I had the program write One's and Zero's on it then reformat the drive. Thanks again all.