wondering....

[barjack]

sorry i don't know where to put this:

If i wanted to delete everything on my hardrive and just revert it back to its factory stepup how would i go about doing so ?
is there a process?
Most of it is games and movies os nothing major id just like all my hard drive space back in which 70 gig of it disappeared never to be reclaimed no matter what i deleted can anyone explain that?

 

[digitalwanderer]

It's called a "reinstall" which is short for "reinstalling your operating system and every bloody thing else", and it is a BIIIIIIG deal that you should really research and understand before you attempt!

 

[Geo]

Hmm, what do you mean by "factory"? Tell us how you got this harddrive? Did it come preinstalled and loaded with a Dell, Gateway, etc machine? If so, you may have some CDs or DVDs to return your machine to its native state.

But, I really don't advise that except in extremis. Unless you are absolutely, utterly sure you have ALL your data backed up somewhere. And even then I'd bet you only think you do, and two weeks or two months later you'd "ARRRGH!!" over something that got missed.

How old is this drive? 70gig is practically a rounding error on modern drives. . . it could be that the OS or some utility has been marking sectors as bad, and that's where your 70gig went. On my primary drive, which isn't all that big by current standards, 70GB is less than .5%

 

[barjack]

Hmm, what do you mean by "factory"? Tell us how you got this harddrive? Did it come preinstalled and loaded with a Dell, Gateway, etc machine? If so, you may have some CDs or DVDs to return your machine to its native state.

But, I really don't advise that except in extremis. Unless you are absolutely, utterly sure you have ALL your data backed up somewhere. And even then I'd bet you only think you do, and two weeks or two months later you'd "ARRRGH!!" over something that got missed.

How old is this drive? 70gig is practically a rounding error on modern drives. . . it could be that the OS or some utility has been marking sectors as bad, and that's where your 70gig went. On my primary drive, which isn't all that big by current standards, 70GB is less than .5%

this came standard with my hp i bought some year and half to two years ago.
i don't think it ever came with those cds i still have them in there neat package....(packrat)
everything is backup i have a maxtor external harddrive ( 300g)and ive backed up all the files from my comp
the hard drive is 120 GB and then after having it a few months 70GB dissapered and i new i hadn't had it long enough to take that much space as i had no internet. and i was down to roughly forty as i had installed rome and a few other misc. games

 

[Geo]

Yeah, well I had a major brainfart there, so ignore me. Rough day. I don't know how I looked at GB all those times and read MB. D'oh.

 

[digitalwanderer]

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=318378

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html

http://www.tweakhound.com/xp/installxp/installXP1.htm

Those should give you an idea about reinstalling.

You might want to give TreeSize a try and let it find that missing 70Gb for you...