I need a geek.

[Ken King]

Was gifted a laptop running XP. Nice little machine, nothing great but I'll use it, however it seems that whomever cleaned off the old files and data also partitioned the harddrive at 8.66 Gb, the drive is an 80 Gb and shows the "space" not in Drive C as being unallocated. Now I don't want to create another drive but would rather "extend" Drive C to the full volume of the physical drive. Is there anything short of doing a format and full installation of the OS that can be done to allocate the unused space?

 

[GWguy]

We used to use a utility called Partition Magic to do that. Not aware if there is something newer/better.

 

[jrt_ms1995]

Free

Use GParted. See the instructions under the "Live CD/USB" tab.

 

[bobbyb]

Is this a Dell? If so there is an orginal image in that small partition that you may use to reimage that laptop whenever it needs it. Be very carefull with Partition Magic and GParted. When they are told to do something they will do it. you can very easily distroy your image or worse your drive. I use Partition Magic it works very well and is very reliable. Partition Magic is not cheep so GParted is probably your best bet.

 

[Ken King]

It was an HP, anyway I ended up screwing it up using one of the free tools, not sure if it was the tool or me, but it cost me $70 to get it fixed once I located a somewhat local service company. They got me back up and this laptop is stroking along fine. Thanks for the recommendations.

 

[MADPEBS1]

have you upgraded OS to Vista or later? XP stops being supported, guess as long as you don't hook it up to internet you are good...

 

[Ken King]

No upgrade to OS, just got it back to how it should have been. Why should I worry about hooking it up to the internet? It loves the internet and out performs a Toshiba Satellite that was running WIN7. Just because MS won't be supporting the OS doesn't mean it still can't work just fine. My AV will protect me, and stay current with the definitions, as hackers seek out the flaws of the newer and improved OSs that are out there.