Posted: 7/20/2005 10:18:16 AM EDT
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I have a Compaq Presario desk top running Windows ME. The computer came with a 40 gig hard drive and it was getting ready to die. I picked up a new 80 gig drive, installed it, copied the contents of the original drive, then removed the old drive. At this point every thing worked ok, and explorer showed the 80 gig drive. Today I used the Recovery CD that came with the system to restore it to factory settings. This worked fine, but now explorer shows the new drive as a 20 gig. WTF? Does anybody have any idea how to get ME to show the proper size of the drive? Thanks |
But why would it do that when the original drive was a 40 gig? Every other time I used the Recovery CD it showed the entire 40. |
because compaqs image is based on the lowest denominator of machine. they are seldom customised to an individual machine but more to the product line. Odss are one variation of your system only shppied with a 20gb drive. mike |
If you can find Windows 2000, that's a fine OS. XP is great too; if your hardware is a little slow, you can turn off some of the glitz and glam and have something quite fast on modest hardware. Jim |
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I have replaced hundreds of drives with your same scenario. i have never had one come up as 20gb if the original was 40gb. I would call compaq and ask them , or re run the cd's did you buy the hd new. if it was used??? The previous owner could have parttitioned the drive you might have to re fdisk the harddrive to get it to see the full capacity. upgrading to xp would fix the problem though. once you boot into xp you could format the remaining free space as a new drive . |
The drive is a brand new western digital. When I originally installed the drive I installed it as a slave then copied the contents of the 40 gig drive that was going bad. In this setup, the system showed the C: and D: partitions and added up to the 80 gig. After a restore from the recovery CD, it shows the C: as 15 gig and the D: as 5 gig. |
ignore what he said fedora.redhat.com/download/ use the rest of your hard drive to install a real operating system (at no cost). |
Ya, what the hell.  (FC4 user, here) |
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Well, the Quick Restore didn't work. It wouldn't even restore the system. I reinstalled the old hard drive and copied everything to the 80 gig. Everything copied fine and it now shows the full size of the new drive. If I run accross a copy of XP without having to pay a couple of hundred dollars, I'll pick it up. Thanks for your suggestions. |
oh its one of those systems  compaq puts the recovery cds on a d: partition. without that partition.( harddrive crash or replacing drive) you loose capibility or running the cd's. let me guess it say wrong machine or Please contact tech support right? when you try to run the recovery cd! it that case.. if you want ME back on the computer you will have to call compaq and pay for a second set of cd's im guess 30 to 40 bucks the compaq cd you have now. it just a little program that starts the installation. the second partition does all the work. but without one or the other its useless. as u have seen. your better off getting xp home upgrade, if your system spec are ok. at lease 256mb of ram. and a minimum of 7 or 800Mhz. it just depends on how patient you are really. you can install the upgrade without a previous OS. boot off the xp home cd. then it will get to a point where it asks for a previous OS cd. you will have to
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No, I knew It wouldn't install off of the recovery cd that they give you with the system (been through that before on other people's systems). I knew my hard drive was going so I ordered the installation cd's from Compaq. Before I got them, I picked up the new drive so I just copied the old one to the new 80 gig. When I tried the cd's that they sent me, it gives me "error: you must select only 1 partition". Which is the way I set up the new drive. It ends up installing just a bare bones version of ME with no drivers for the integrated video or the network adapter. |