Top Tip: Partition Magic stole my hard disk!

After partitioning his hard drive, a reader discovers that a formerly 40GB drive now holds only 32GB. How can he get the 8GB back and where did the capcity go? Readers come to the rescue!

Tips used for Top Tips come from the ExtremeTech forum and are written by our community. Question from nerfhurter
"i used partition magic 7 to partition my harddrive but then decided to unpartition it. after doing so, my 40gig is now only 32gig. how can i get my other 8 gig back? " Answer from akseli
"ok, your problem is that you are trying to create a FAT32 partition, which only supports sizes up to 32GB, to have one SINGLE partition over 32GB you will have to use NTFS, to use it youll need an operating system running on the NT kernel; Windows... XP, 2k, NT (all versions) if you are running Windows 98, 98se, Me (older 2) youll have to stick with one 32 GB partition and one 8 GB one, or partition it into two partition but with different sizes for each one of them... good luck, ps. post any further questions that you might have" Answer from djugan
"Consider your hard drive to be something like a file cabinet with the potential to have multiple drawers in which to place your folders and your files. Take advantage of this line of thinking and youll find it much easier to use and maintain your storage capacity. " Got a better answer? Post it in the discussion that generated this tip.