Crazy Hard Drive

[hawk6007]

Have installed 80GB Maxtor HDD. Tried to format with the following results.
Cannot format via My Computer. Tried Partition Magic v8 - it appeared to format but when checking again was advised that it was not NTFS. Checking Properties via My Computer it shows 31.4GB. It I check via Computer Management it shows 76.4GB NTFS and healthy in bottom half of screen yet in the top section shows only 31.5GB with 31.43 GB free. OS XP Pro

How can I format the entire HDD to get all of the capacity back please?

Thanks
Hawk6007

[Rich M]

In Parttion Magic merge the partitions or unallocated space and when you choose format, be certain you chose NTFS.

[hawk6007]

Thanks but that did not work. There was nothing to merge. I reformatted (or so I thought) again, but going back into Partition Magic it still shows that it is bad. SMART on boot up shows HDD is OK and Computer Management indicates that the HDD is healthy

Any more ideas please?

Thanks

[Rich M]

What exactly does disk management in Admin Tools, Computer management, Storage show?
Must be Fat32 format as I seem to remember that in XP or 2000, the limit for FAT32 partition is 32 gig...why not go in with partition magic and delete the partition you did and then create a new partition in NTFS and format.

[hawk6007]

Thanks but that did not work either. I downloaded Maxblast4 from Maxtor website and that showed that drive was formatted as FAT16 - although Partition Magic showed NTFS. That does seem to explain why HDD was showing up as only 31.4GB but does not explain how it happened. I have now formatted with this new program and everything is working fine. Anyone who has Maxtor HDD should have look at their site if they encounter HDD problems