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i have installed 80 gig SATA hard drive

i can only acess 5 gig in windows

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by disophisis

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, is steering you the right way. Open Disk Management (Start -> Run -> diskmgmt.msc). If you see a 5 GB C: partition and a big chunk of Unallocated space to the right, you have not used the rest of the disk yet. You can either create a new partition in the unallocated space, or extend C:. Note: on Windows Vista/7/10 you can extend C: in Disk Management if the unallocated space is immediately to the right. On Windows XP, you cannot extend the system partition on a basic disk; you would need a third‑party partitioner or a reinstall to change C: non‑destructively. Always back up before resizing.

If Disk Management only shows a 5 GB total size for the drive (no unallocated space), check:

  • BIOS/UEFI: does it report ~80 GB? If BIOS also shows ~5 GB, the drive may be clipped by a jumper (rare on SATA) or by an HPA/DCO set by a previous system. Use the drive maker’s diagnostic utility to restore full capacity.
  • Controller/chipset drivers: install the correct SATA/Chipset driver for your motherboard. Wrong/legacy drivers can cause odd geometry reporting.
  • Prior non‑Windows partitions: if the disk was used by Linux/DVR, Windows may show only the small NTFS partition and mark others as Unknown. You can delete those and reclaim the space if you no longer need them.

On Vista/7/10, you can also try DiskPart to extend into contiguous unallocated space:

diskpart
list volume
select volume <your C: volume number>
extend

See Microsoft’s DiskPart reference for details and limitations: Microsoft DiskPart.

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Member Avatar for disophisis

Have you gone into disk management in windows and checked if there is more space that is 'unallocated'?

What is the brand of your hard drive?

Member Avatar for disophisis

if you cannot see the rest of your disk in disk management then I'd make a bootable cd with ranish partition manager on it. booting from the cd should show you your hard drives and all partitions on them. It also lets you manipulate them. but be careful, changing your system partition will probably destroy your install of windows.

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