Missing Drive Space

If your new system appears to filling up too quickly or you notice you don't have the hard drive sizes you expected when you ordered your PC. There are a couple of things to check.

So Right click on your Start Menu and choose Disk Management

You should have Disk 0 which is your SSD & Disk 1 which is your larger storage disk

Look at disk 1 does it show as Unallocated or as Unknown/Not Initialized

If it shows up as Not Initialized you can attempt to right click on the drive & Initialize then format the  drive. This should then show up as additional space for you to use usually disk D:

Sometimes the drive will be present but not have a drive letter assigned.

If that is the case just right click the drive and assign it a letter, again usually D:

However if this fails it indicates that something is not plugged in properly or has physically failed

In which case please see these instructions to check the hardware connections 

Power off the computer and unplug the power lead then remove the side panels. You will  have to remove the Glass and the metal panel on the either side of the PC.

Please check inside your case and see if any of the cables pictured below have come loose. There will be 2 of these cables one for the SSD and one for your mechanical drive

One most of our more recent PC there will no longer be a small SSD as that has been replaced by a faster NVMe card which is faster type of SSD in  a different format.

But in this case we are interested in the mechanical hard drive or HDD see below

Mechanical drives are usually in the bottom section of the case and are slightly larger and silver in colour

Please note the thinner red DATA cable pictured below are often plain black & doesn't always have the metal clip 

The wider POWER cable are also often just solid and black 

You will need to check the DATA cable connections at both ends of the cables at the drive itself and at the motherboard. And the Power power connection at the drive itself. 

The best way to reseat the cables is to unplug then plug them back in.

The physically smaller drive is your SSD and that is where Windows or your Operation System is located. 

And the physically larger silver coloured drive is your mechanical drive with more capacity

So if the cable is loose on the SSD you will not be able to boot into windows

And if the cable is loose on your mechanical drive you should still be able to boot into windows but  have less storage capacity then you expect.

So please make sure that the DATA & Power cables are seated snugly & firmly in the drives & that the DATA cable is also nicely seated in the Motherboard sockets.

Then when you boot back into windows and Disk Management you might still see the drive as Not initialized but right clicking and Initializing the drive as MBR (Master Boot Record) should be successful.

If the drive still wont initialize the problem is most likely a hardware fault, so please take some pictures inside your case and send them to us so we can try to identify if a cable or component has become loose or damaged

Also if you have a spare, known good, SATA cable please can you try swapping the cable over. If this fixes the issue please contact us and we can send you out a fresh SATA cable.

All being well you should now see your new drive but it still isn't quite ready to use

The drive still might show up as Unallocated

If it does right click inside the drive and choose New Simple Volume & follow the Wizard to create the new volume

1. Right-click an unallocated region on your hard disk, and then select New Simple Volume.

2. In the New Simple Volume Wizard, select Next.

3. Enter the size of the volume you want to create in megabytes (MB) or accept the maximum default size, and then select Next.

4. Accept the default drive letter or choose a different drive letter to identify the partition, and then select Next.

5. In the Format Partition dialog box, do one of the following:

6. • If you don't want to format the volume right now, select Do not format this volume, and then select Next.

   • To format the volume with the default settings, select Next.

7. Review your choices, and then select Finish.

You will now have an extra drive to use, usually drive D:

So when you are installing large games or large applications

Choose custom installation & choose to install on your D: drive rather than the C: or system drive.

You may now also want to move some of your existing larger games to the D: drive.