I have a laptop that I use for logging/tuning. Nothing too fantastic. Dell Inspiron 1000. Anyway. I bought it used. Claimed to have a 40GB hardrive. I was loading something today and it wouldn't fit. I was like WTF? I checked C: and it's a total of 10gb. I pulled the hardrive and it says WD400EU, a 40gb Western Digital drive. Doesn't look like it has been tampered with.
I dont have the drive partitioned so where the hell are my other 30gb's?

I've had the laptop for 6 months and I got it off ebay so its not like I can send it back. I was just wondering if there was a setting I'm missing or did I get a 10mb hardrive with a 40gb sticker?

 

That is odd I have never heard of one loosing space usually the just quit. I would go into the device manager and check what the properties say for the drive. I believe it should tell you what device number the computer is reading and that should give you a clue if you got screwed or not. I think you can pick up a new drive for around $65 if you end up needing one.

 

I just ordered a 80gb from newegg. I never checked to see if the drive was a 40gb to begin with. So I dont know if the space got corrupted and went away or was just never there.
I only have 4gb of stuff on it anyway. Its just my truck laptop. I was trying to install the GM DVD Manual and it required 10mb to run. That's the only reason I found out....

EDIT: I ordered a 120gb. It was only a few bucks more.

 

ya, you didnt lose 30 gigs of space... sounds like the computer had a hard drive crash at somepoint. When that happens and you actually want to retrive data from the harddrive that crashed, you can spend thousands just to recover the data. Since that probably DIDNT happen w/ the previous owner, they probably just replaced it with a 10gb harddrive they had laying around, and those being older than dirt, they probably put the harddrive in the case that says 40gb or whatever you mentioned.

what kind of processing speed and ram does that computer have? you might want to see what the max ram is for that motherboard and just max it out with the largest ram sticks you can go with, that model dell sounds kinda old, probably doesnt have that much ram, idk.

 

um sounds like someone stuck a sticker on it and sold u crap. go into ur BIOS and see what it says there and also try the above method. sounds like u got hosed.

 

Here's all I know about it.
System Properties:
Windows XP (I put that on)
Mobile Intel Celeron 2.20GHz
512MB RAM

I popped it open and saw PC2700 333 DDR. I'd buy more memory to go with the bigger hard drive but I dont know where to get it. Maybe 1GB?

I guess I got hosed. Oh well. It was only $400 and it works great, just a small HD.

 

Just went into the BIOS.

It says
CPU Speed 2200MHz
Internal HDD 40GB
System Memory 512MB @ 266MHz
So, I am missing 30gb or HD space???

 

Cylinders: 16383
Heads: 16
Sectors: 63
Max Capacity: 40GB

Multi Sector transfers: 16 Sectors
LBA mode Enabled
32 bit I/O Disabled
Transfer Mode: FPIO 4 / DMA 2
Ultra DMA Mode: Mode 5

Thats all the info. Fix it

 

It probably is there, just the computer is not recognizing it because it was not set up correctly. The disk sounds like it was partitioned to 10gig and 30gig (allowing 2 vitural disks on 1 phyical disk). The 30 gig sounds like it was never formated. You could check this out.

Control Panel -> Adminstrative tools -> Computer Management

Then in the directory tree on the left choose 'Disk Management'

Post up a picture of what it shows, hopefully from there I can guide on how to recover or gain access to the 30gig.

 

Since you already got a 120 gig HD from newegg.
check the motherboard name and type on dells web site.
Look and see if you can run a higher processor, one with a larger L 2 cache.
Check and see what the Max amount of memory it can use and the type.