I have an 80gb Hitachi Hard Drive that I have connected to Windows 8 through the use of an external usb. When the drive opens, it shows that it has 31.1 gb free of 31.4gb. I looked at this drive in Disk Management and it shows as (F:) 31.48 gb NTFS Healthy (Active, Primary Partition) and 13 MB Unallocated. So do you suppose that the 48.8 gb's not showing are on another partition and I cannot see it? and if so, what is the best way to go about finding out?

I can add or remove files from this drive while it is connected to Windows 8 but I would like to have the full 80gb if that is possible.

Can you boot with the drive connected? I am curious to see if the BIOS would display the drive and what it would say. Can you take a look?

_________________
Patty MacDuffie
Computer Haven Administrator

Live Long and Prosper
Mr. Spock

Yes, it boots with the 80gb drive connected but the drive in question does not display in the bios.

I was afraid of that. Does it read the full 80 GBs connected to a different machine or a different OS?

The other thing you can do is connect it to an internal SATA cable and take a look at it in the BIOS.

_________________
Patty MacDuffie
Computer Haven Administrator

Live Long and Prosper
Mr. Spock

It reads exactly the same of Windows 7 as it does on Windows 8.........It's an IDE Hard Drive and I'm not sure if any of my computers has a second IDE slot on the motherboard. I will check it out and get back.

OK. Could be an issue with the USB adapter too. This will eliminate that.

_________________
Patty MacDuffie
Computer Haven Administrator

Live Long and Prosper
Mr. Spock

OK, the box that Windows 8 is in has both sata and ide drives so I was able to add the 80gb drive as a slave. The bios now shows Windows 8 as the master drive, capacity 200gb......... and the 80 gb drive capacity as being 80 gb, however, when Windows 8 boots up and I go to My Computer, the slave drive shows as Local Disk (F:) and 31.1gb free of 31.4gb.

So where is my other 48gb?

Have you gone to Drive Management? My guess is that it is unallocated space. If that is the case you can create another partition in that space or kill the current partition and create a single partition that includes the entire drive, the latter is probably what I'd do. Don't forget to format. Also, if you decide to create a full disk partition, get any data off of it first.

_________________

I had gone to Drive Management previously but that was when the drive was connected using the usb port. It showed about 8mb of unallocated space. Then I installed the drive as a slave in Windows 8 and never thought to go back and check it again until reading your post. When I re-checked it, it had some 46gb of unallocated space. I just clicked on "extend volume" and it brought up a Wizard, two more clicks and I had an 80gb hard drive. My next step is to remove the drive from Windows 8 and put the it back into the external drive enclosure and see how it works in the usb port. Thanks much for your help.

Cool! When you go back to the USB enclosure I will be surprised if you don't see the full drive.

_________________

Here is what the drive looks like in Disk Management now that it's back in the external drive enclosure and plugged into the Windows 8 USB port.

That is right around where it should be.

_________________