Help - formatting a hard drive

[GerryDavid]

I have a Western Digital 20gb hard drive that I bought back in 2000 or so.

At the time I tried to hook it up to the desktop at the time and it was to old to support the 20gb. So I was playing with it and it ended up getting formatted to 500mb's.

After putting it off for a year, I put it into my new desktop pc. But when I go to my computer, right click on drive e, format, I dont get any options other than 500mbs in the drop down list.

How do I format it back to 500mb's? Do I have to go to the command prompt? I tried "fdisk /?" and it said it didnt know the command, then "format /?" and I didnt see the option I was looking for.

If it helps, the pc is windows xp, 2.4ghz emachine.

Theres som options that I dont know whats best. It offers Fat32, fat and ntfs for file systems, whats best for windows xp? And for allocation file size, I had more options than default before but now it says default.

Also Id like to devide the drive up into 2 parts, one for a scratch disk for photoshop, the other for some picture storage/backup. 10gb's isnt much but maybe put the pictures ive worked on to be prints over there or something.

Any advice is welcome. :0)

 

[Corry]

http://www.thesupportforum.com

 

[ferny]

500mb?!?! That must have been an old OS to not have some form of work around! :shock:

You want to format it so it goes back to 20gb, right?

I don't know xp and I only know what I do by fiddling with my computer ( ). So I did a google.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=313348

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=309000

And here is the google search link.
http://www.google.com/search?q=format+windows+xp&sourceid=opera&num=50&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

Formating the hdd with erase everything by the way. Just incase you didn't know.

 

[GerryDavid]

Thanks core, but I wanted a fast responss, last time I went there it took a few days for an answer I believe. :0) I went to a few forums and 60% of them replied within an hour.

The old os was windows 95. The motherboard could support 3 or 4gb's, I was trying something out that caused it to go to 500mbs, then I couldnt get the other space back after that, hehe. Then the old 3gb hd messed up causing the pc not to start so I just went and got a notebook pc since that desktop was a paperweight.

 

[GerryDavid]

Got it to work with someones advice to go to control pannel, etc. Took forever to format though but oh well.