hard disk space missing

[M3mph15]

i found two days back that my 40GB hard disk showed only the partition c: and all the rest were gone and it's capacity is only 5 gb
i formatted c drive and reloaded windows 98 but i can still see only one partition c: of 5 gb space . the rest of the hard disk space has vanished what can i do???

[The Grunt]

Sounds like a screwed hard drive... Best bet is to buy a new one... MoBo might be messed up too... Have a mod move this to hardware so you get some more replies from people who don't look at GCC. You ought to get a different hard drive (someone will let you borrow theirs I hope) and see if they will read correctly.

[DeadAddict]

Did you have another operating system installed on it such as windows 2000, Xp and did you use ntfs?
If you did what I would do is use a windows startup disk and select the option to start the computer with out cdrom support and then once you are at the command prompt type in fdisk then select option 4 this will show you all listed partitions, if there are any non dos partitions delete them and then you should be able to partition and format them within windows 98 and regain the missing hard drive space.

[the_JinX]

formating a disk doesn't bring back lost space..
partitioning does..

try using fdisk preferably from your windows install/boot disk..

warning using fdisk can be dangerous..
You need to read all the texts realy carefully or you might destroy any data still on the disk..
Making backups might be a good idea

also you could use some other partitioning tool.. like partition magic or such..