I have a compaq presario , 80 GB 7200RPM Ultra DMA hard drive( Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9) , 3100+ AMD sempron processor( 1.80 GHz, 256 kb L2 cache, 1600MHz system bus) , 512 MB PC3200 DDR SDRAM memory, ..... well i had gotten some corrupted files and my computer crashed and wouldnt start up so i took it to a friend of mine who knows a little bit about computers and he was able to run my hard drive as a slave in his computer and was able to wipe all files and reformatted it with Windows XP Pro ... only problem i am having now is that it reads that it only has like 32 GBs of total space he is at a loss as to why this is and so am i .... can anyone help me figure out this problem?My initial guess would be that he used an older VERSION of Windows to format that drive...there were size limitations back then.

Did he format in FAT32 or NTFS ?
Did he re-install your OS ?
Is it the same drive you gave him ?

patio. 8-)You may have more than 1 partition or if formatted as FAT32 only a partition was created. You can check this out. Compaqs FREQUENTLY have a hidden partition for restoring the OS as well. Let us know.

If that was not a legal XP Pro or it has already been loaded on another machine you will have problems soon due to the activation by the way. i was with him when he did all this so i do know that it is the same hard drive.... when my computer boots up it says in the bottom left corner something about COPYRIGHTS 2001....also i pulled the hard drive and noticed that the jumper was on the clj spot insted of the master spot??? does thismatter when formatting.... ?
sorry for the questions as i am quite new to computers but cant really afford to pay someone to fix itYou have a jumper on the drive set incorrectly. The CLJ or AC jumper limits the drive to a maximum of 32 GB (only useful on older PC motherboards)

If you format the drive with the CLJ or AC jumper then the drive capacity will be limited to 32GB. After removing the CLJ or AC jumper the drive will still be recognized as 32GB. You must reformat the drive WITHOUT the CLJ or AC jumper to gain the full capacity of the drive.

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/images/useries6family.gif
http://service.maxtor.com/rightnow/images/maxtor_quantum%20jumpers.htm

One of these should help, If you have another brand hard drive, the label usually indicates the jumpers. REMOVE ALL jumpers, and then only place the one jumper for master/single, or cable select, if you can use that. Macs for the last couple of years can all use cable select, but master/single should be OK

You may need to partition and format the drive again and reload Windows!

You also may want to find someone else to help with your repairs if your friend did this. If he did place the jumper there ask him why.