Problems with Partioning

(Long read but I need help!)

I just recently purchased the Western Digital 80gb hard drive "Special Edition" with 8mb of cache and I installed a new version of Windows XP Pro on it. I have two hard drives now. This new 80gb one and my older 8 gb one. Well I decided to partition the new 80gb hard drive so that I could have one partition only for Windows XP. Well I did that and so I split the 80gb hard drive into two with one being only 4 gb for Windows XP.

Well I had problems with that and I ended up having to format my hard drive many times. Since you can't format all your hard drives at one time (there has to be an OS on one HD to format the other one). I've installed this same copy of Windows XP on both hard drives many times. Right now I only have it installed on my new WD HD. The reason I kept formatting is because it kept on saying I didn't have an internet connection when my cable modem is sitting right here in perfect condition.

Anyways I'm finally able to get online but here's my problem. "My Computer" says that I have only two hard drives instead of 3. But instead of the 4 gb partition being added back to the 80gb hard drive it's just non-existent. So basically I've lost 4gb and I need to know how to get that back. I don't care if that means having to reformat harddrives again as I've been doing that already and there is nothing crucial on either hard drive right now.

So basically how do I get back my lost 4gbs? If anyone needs any more explanation or has any questions I'll be happy to answer them.

Go to Control Panel and open Administrative Tools, then select Computer Management. You will see a Storage option there. This should show you all drives and partitions, there current state, file type (FAT or NTFS) as well as if they are formatted or not. You can make changes, and format any unformatted partitions here.

Thanks Unforgiven! A couple more quick questions. I didn't see any way to add it back to the original 80gb hard drive. So I just had to creat a new partition. So now it's back to being a 4gb drive, but I don't have any need for it as a stand alone hard drive because Windows XP is already on the other part of the 80gb hard drive. Is there any way to restore it to the 80gb hard drive?

Another quick question. I know this is sort of in the wrong forum but I thought it'd be better to ask it here instead of creating a new thread.

The version of Windows XP I have on my computer is the Academic Version. But for some reason when my computer is booting up it says "Please boot from disc". So Windows and everything will boot up but I'm forced to have the Windows XP Pro disc inside my cd drive at all times. Why is this happening and is there any way to fix it?

Thanks for all the help.

Without a program like Partition Magic, I don't think you can recover that 4GB partition without killing everything and doing it over.

I'm far from being an XP expert, and I know even less about the academic versions of the OS. I don't know if this is a requirement of the conditions for use.