regaining disc space after messy xp install

[prawny1]

Hello,

Last week I replaced my dads 20gb (with 2% free space)hdd in his old compaq evo desktop with my 80 gb slave and popped in an extra 256mb pc133 (grand total 512mb),

Whilst installing i got to a point when it had finished installing the setup files and wanted me to reboot to continue the instalation,

After I pressed enter to reboot the thing went through the whole set up again asking which drive to use etc, It did this three times before I realised i need to eject the restrore disc ,

Forth time the install went fine it even pre activated like it does on my laptop which surprised me considering the tower was shipped 2000 pro originaly,but during the set up I noticed that the size had been dropping from 79.1gb that i had freshly formated the night before down to 74.5gb available as a single c partition by the time i got the instalation to complete.

Anyway my question is would it be possible to recover the lost 4½gb from the failed/repeated install attempts or would I need to completely reformat the entire drive and do the install first time this time?

I just think its a shame to go through the whole process of changing the hdd and reinstalling all his programs and drivers etc to then not get the full benefit of it storage wise, his drive is showing 74.5gb total and 69.7gb free space instead of having 74ish gb free.
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hellkat wrote:

Some people are only alive cos its against the law to kill them.

[Pete.]

Is the restore process making backup copies of the previous operating system installs? If it is, just delete those copies. Look in the file structure of C: to see if they are placed somewhere obvious.
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a.k.a 'Geri'

132.9mph off and walked away. Gear is good, gear is good, gear is very very good

[2E]

check you haven't got a folder called 'WINDOWS.OLD' as thats the folder that holds all the previous installation files of windows.. you might need to take ownership of it to delete it.. but that should free up a few gig.

Note that XP reads gigs differently so 80 gig may read as 70-75, i've got a 500gig harddisk drive in my windows 7 pc and that reads as 465gig total space..
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Bringing Classic Bikes Back Into Fashion
Rides: 1980 Honda CX500

[prawny1]

the hdd was totaly reformatted on my xp pro tower before hand and did show 79.1gb, it gradualy reduced in size after every time the pc tried to boot from the install cd and loaded the setup files over again,

Ill have a mooch for any windows old files when I pop down tommorow, but tbh I think having old files would just take hdd space not prevent it from showing in my computer.

I haven't had chance to check disk managment to see exactly whats going on but I will try that too.
Cheers for your help guys.
____________________
hellkat wrote:

Some people are only alive cos its against the law to kill them.

[panrider_uk]