Crashed Hard drive?
 

I was using Windows XP that didn't have a CD drive. This day i connected a CD drive and did my works. But suddenly when i removed the CD drive and restarted the computer, the windows didn't work. I went to the BIOS mode and checked the drive configuration. The hard disk was there but to my surprise it showed only 32.2 GB hard disk. The disk actually is of 120 GB.

I then connected this disk to another one as a slave drive but it showed that this drive is corrupted and is needed to be formatted to reuse. So i formatted the drive. Still the drive is shown to be 32.2 GB. What is the cause of this and how can i manage the drive?

You need to format the drive to NTFS, FAT32 has a 32GB size limit.
Limitations of the FAT32 File System in Windows XP

I formatted the drive in NTFS. But no improvement shows in the hard drive. Any other ways?

How about using Low Level Disk Format Utility ? Can it do some help?

The properties of the drive shows: Used space: 90.1 MB
Free space: 31.4 GB.
What to do ? Suffering from this problem. Any way out ?

Make sure that the jumper is not set to limit the drive to 32g.

Then what you need to do is use a utility from the manufacturers site to read and remove all partitions or use the diagnostics that is usually built in to the correct manufacturers utility program.

Well, Thank-u...but i hardly understood you. Utilities from the manufacturer means ? Do you mean i shouldn't use any low level disk format utility ? And i should use the utility only from the manufacturer ?

A low level format can take days to perform, as it depends on the computer that the drive is installed in. When dealing with low level formatting or disc repair, it is all ways best to use the repair/installation/diagnostics utillity that is made from the same company that manufacturers the harddrive to begin with. In some cases other repair programs may not see a drive made by a different manufacturer.

For instance:

seagate harddrives ...use the "seatools" utillity to make repairs to the drives.

for western digital use the "data lifeguard" tools

Got the solution..
 

Thank-u for helping out. I got my 90 GB back.

The jumper setting was made to limit the drive space to 32 GB.I got the jumper out and then was fine.

:)

Thanks for telling us that you found the solution!

Fine with the drive space but the problem persisted still. I installed windows XP from bootable CD with the c: drive space 4 GB. The installation was successful. Surprisingly, i need not install any driver for the graphical adjustment. Everything just got on well. But then i restarted my computer with the recently setup XP with the first boot priority. But the OS didn't start.
I checked the drive from the BIOS. It is detected. I made the drive slave and checked,the files are all installed. But doesn't boot. What may be the cause ?