80GB hard drive now 8GB?

[thunderwolf429]

I have a HP Pavillion zv5330. One day, it wouldn't load Windows. I kept getting one of two messages:

PXE: Media test failure, check cable;
or Disk Read Error.

I didn't have the recovery disks. A friend had the recovery disks for the zv6000 series, so I tried that. Windows installed fine, but then I realized that I only have 8 GB. I went to reinstall again, thinking I had done something wrong, but at the setup screen it tells me that I have

8221 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR].
C: Partition 1 8213 MB
Unpartitioned Space 8MB

I'd appreciate any help. I'm also a computer novice, so I'm not very knowledgeable about these things.

Thanks!
Suzanne

[degsy]

Welcome

It seems as though your friend has used a very old setup disk to partition/format the drive.

Does the BIOS still detect the 80gb drive?

If so you may want to use another disk manager to partition and format. You could use FDISK something like KillDisk and then use the XP Setup to partition and format.

http://www.killdisk.com/

[thunderwolf429]

Thanks for the welcome and advice. I probably should have mentioned that I really don't know what I'm doing, so I don't know how to find out if BIOS still detects my hard drive. I'll give killdisk a try.

[degsy]

Note that killdisk will wipe everything from the drive.

[Rich M]

On an HP tap F1 or F2 right after you push the power button until you enter bios (setup) and look for the screen that shows you size of hard drive.
As degs said a product like Norton Partition Magic 8.0 will easily pick up the unallocated space once you determine it is there...actually do this:
Start, settings, Control panel, Admin Tools, Computer Management, Storage, Disk management ...and in there you should see the size of the drive in Windows and if it shows * gb used and the rest unallocated, then Partition magic can merge or restore the rest of the drive.
That had to be really old disks to hang with the 8gb hard drive lmit and it couldn't be XP either now is it?