Regain Factory Hard Drive Capacity

[Azuria]

hii every one,
recently i noticed that my hard disc space is keep on reducing but in fact i did not introduced any files in to my laptop..am using windows vista Baisc on my Compaq Presario. does any one out here know what is wrong ??can i retrieve my old disc space ??
help...me....thank you for your patience in reading

[Rawko]

Several reasons of why your hard drive might lose some megabytes or even gigabytes,it can be any of following

*Operating System does not support LBA48 addressing mode
as you using Windows Vista does not have any issue with big drives

* You are mixing binary and decimal gigabytes
Hard drive manufacturers use decimal gigabytes while operating systems use binary gigabytes,it's around 7% difference So, your 300 GB hard drive will show up in Windows as a 279 GB hard drive.

*motherboard has created a hidden area on your hard drive to store a backup of the BIOS binaries
Motherboard can create a so-called “Host protected area” on your hard drive to store its data. Usually this area is not bigger than 10 megabytes, so there is nothing to worry about.

* May be PC/Laptop manufacturer has created a hidden area on your hard drive to store a backup of the Operating System installation files (needed for automatic restore functionality)
Usually this area is quite large (8-20 GB).

* You have used some software that sets HPA (Host Protected Area), messes with DCO (Device Configuration Overlay), or switches off LBA48 support

* misplace of a jumper on the drive
Most hard drives have a special jumper setting that allows you to limit their capacity to either 32 or 128 (137) gigabytes.

Regain factory capacity

> Check jumpers, Consult with manufacturer’s instructions and set jumpers to the proper position.

> Check your OS, does it have all updates installed?

>if above cases sucks use HDD Capacity Restore Tool that analyzes your hard drive’s LBA48, HPA and DCO status and recovers factory settings

[Fabian]

dude may be you can Check disk partitions by Windows Disk Management console and see if there is any free space that is not used by any partition,a large capacity hard drive of between 500GB and 1.5TB suddenly appears to loose most of its capacity for no apparent reason. In many situations the capacity of the hard drive shrinks to 32MB (or 32GB) and becomes inaccessible to the Windows Vista.What's happening, to put it simply, is that the portion of the hard drive responsible for telling the computer how big it is, is mis-reporting that value.may be caused bya portion of the drive firmware known as the LBA48, HPA and DCO records corruption.
.

[Killen]

if your windows updates downloaded all the updates and not yet
installed properly.it will utilize some space on your hard disc..may be you can check out this