Why did I lose half my hard drive size when I deleted my partition? It was 250GB now it says I have 128GB.?

First, the missing file was 'NTLDR' - and you could have simply restored the file without getting into the hassel of formatting the hard-drive and loosing you data.

Second, regarding the Hard-drive partitioning. What you have done is that you partitioned your hard-drive, but you only created a primary partition that alocated 128 GB from your Hard-drive space. The remaining is simply unallocated. All what you have to do, is create another partition that takes the remaining partition size.

NOTE:

It is never a best practice to create a partition isze that big...

I have a 250GB hard-drive...

My partitions are as following:

c:\ - contains all installations including Windows and is 30GB

if you need more space then 30GB, do make it bigger from the start.

d:\ e:\ f:\ g:\ partitions - sizing 50 GB each where each partition is used for a specific thing...one for downloads, other for private work, etc

The reason for this sizing is to reduce space loss

- the unallocated space is basically your hard-drive space, or what remains from it if you have an existing partition

- once you format a partition, its physical size is reduced during the creation of its file system (the structure of which data will be stored in)

- the larger the partition, the bigger the cluster shall be, and therefore, the more unused space shall exist

this is because if the cluster is 4KB each and you store a 1KB file, the remaining space is simply unued, and can't be used unless you add information to this file.

If you create a larger partition size, the cluster becomes bigger, and the file-loss becomes even more...

Hope this helps...

Good Luck!

with win2000 you need to re-format. a partition is a "logical drive" which means that even though its the same piece of hardware, your computer will recognize the seperation of partitions. when you deleted the partition, your computer recognized it as you deleting a "drive". instead of using the win2000 version of the partitioning and management program, i would recommend using partition magic. its a fantastic program that does the same thing, but gives you better management. also, like you were saying, set up your windows files on a seperate partition. you should only need less than 1 gig but set the partition for 2 gigabytes so your computer will assign enough virtual memory so it does not run poorly.

try reformatting your whole hard disk, that always works for me. then use a program like partition magic to partition it before installing the OS.