How to recover full 250Gb on my HDD

[vinkovci47]

OK - here's the starter. I have a Vaio VGN-AR771E. Like a lot of others i didn't want all the extra software so I formatted and installed my own, legal, Windows Vista. Having done that I find I only have 232 Gb available and I presume the rest is the hidden Sony recovery Files.

I didn't make the Recovery Disks and Disk management doesn't show this space so does anyone have any suggestions as to how to recover the extra 18 Gb which since I paid for I regar as mine

Thanks in anticipation - Stephen

[stone69]

Hello vinkovci47 and welcome to Club VAIO

There is an e-tutorial available here where the recovery process and the option to delete the hidden partition is described for XP, but I assume it will be the same for VISTA.
However as far as I have understood you need to create your recovery discs first (which is anyway a good thing to do) and boot from this disc, then you have the option to remove the hidden partition while doing a recovery from the discs. After that I guess you would have to do "your" setup with you own Vista again, if required..
Maybe there are other ways, but "Partition Magic" or similar seems not to work.

[vinkovci47]

Thanks for your prompt reply. Ther problem is I have formatted C:\ and do not have the recovery software. Which utility do i need to download and install to be able to create the recovery disks.

[stephenmcavoy]

Isn't the remaining 18GB the space Vista takes for a clean install. You will never get the full 250GB, even when you wipe the drive and create a partition to install vista on, that partition will not be the full 250GB....theres always a bit of unpartitioned drive space that you can't use. My disk on my Vaio is mean't to be 200GB but shows in windows as 186GB.

If you've formatted the C: drive then you've might have formatted the Recovery partition which means you'll have to buy Recovery disks. Check your partitions using Command Prompt.

Type, DISKPART and press enter.
then type, LIST DISK

This should show the partitions on your disk.

[vinkovci47]

Done that. Looks like you might be right and it is taken by Vista. Thanks for replying.

[Thalamus.]

OK - here's the starter. I have a Vaio VGN-AR771E. Like a lot of others i didn't want all the extra software so I formatted and installed my own, legal, Windows Vista. Having done that I find I only have 232 Gb available and I presume the rest is the hidden Sony recovery Files. 

I didn't make the Recovery Disks and Disk management doesn't show this space so does anyone have any suggestions as to how to recover the extra 18 Gb which since I paid for I regar as mine   

Thanks in anticipation - Stephen

Hi Stephen,

the difference in hard drive size is partly due to the different way manufactures and Microsoft report the sizes..

Manufacturers use the SI scale for example 1KB = 1000 bytes

Microsoft, ie windows XP/Vista, use the binary, for example 1KB = 1024 bytes

Therefore manufactures 250 GB hard drive = 250,000,000,000 bytes.

Whereas MS 250 GB hard drive = 232 GB

example 250GB manufactures size converted to MS binary scale...

250Gb = 250,000,000,000

/1024 = 244,140,625 kilobytes
/1024 = 238,418 megabytes
/1024 = 232 Gigabytes

So according to Microsoft your HDD size reporting 232GB is correct..