Thank you this is an excellent suggestion. I plan to try it and get back to
you. Nothing else has worked so far.
--
Lee


"...winston" wrote:

> If the second drive is disconnected(ide cable and power connectors), the master drive jumper set correctly, the machine rebooted to the Windows does the original drive size return.
> If you double click on My Computer(how much free and used space is reported)
>
> Note about drive jumpers- , cable select, master, master w/slave, slave etc are the usual settings.
>
> If the original drive size returned after disconnecting the slave drive, reconnect the slave drive, set the jumpers properly, power up, and load the bios..are both drives set to autodetect ? Does the Bios report the correct drive model number.
>
> You machine has an P3 processor thus its likely to only support IDE/PATA drives...is the new(used) slave drive of the same vintage ?
>
> ...winston
>
>
>
> "Lee" <Lee@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message news:7EBB69C8-1BFF-4393-8A29-DFA22AF7F17D@microsoft.com...
> :I added a second (used) 40 GB hard drive to my Dell Dimension L500r pc. It
> : runs on Windows XP professional. In the process, somehow the original 40 GB
> : hard drive shrunk to 3 GB. The added drive also showed only 3 GB, but I was
> : able to initialize, partition and format it to show 37 GB. How can I
> : restore the lost drive space without losing my operating system?
> : --
> : Lee
>