My HP Pavilion's Hard-Drive is only 70GB, when it's supposed to be 1TB

[MorningTea]

So, This laptop used to belong to my mom, until one day, I was deleting some Bloatware that was making the computer slower for her, and I deleted this one application, and it told me to restart, so I did. Immediately it popped up with " HP Recovery Manager ", I think thats what it was called. But at that moment, I was impatient, so I shut the computer off, then turned it back on. It then said, that there was no operating system to boot onto, and I felt really bad, because I had basically broken her laptop. Then for quite a few months my uncle had it at his house to see if he could do anything with it, to recover pictures, anything really. He had no luck with recovering the lost data. So we got it back, and since we couldn't recover anything, I reinstalled Windows 10 onto it ( Which it still has the HP symbol when booting into Windows 10 instead of the Blue Windows symbol, which surprised me. ) but the hard-disk had 5 partitions on it, and none of them I could install onto except for this one with 70 Gigs on it, so I installed it, and it worked just like it did when we bought it. It still only has 70 Gigs of space on it, and I'd like to take back that 1TB that it first had. And I know that I shouldn't have quit that Recovery Manager, but I was really impatient at that moment, and I just wanted to boot into Windows. And Yes, I have tried Diskpart with the Command Prompt, and it didn't make a difference. I did also try that Disk Manager in the Computer Manager program, and it didn't work either, saying that I " Couldn't access the Virtual Drive ". I just would really like to get that 1TB of hard-drive space back, so I can use this laptop properly.

[WAWood]

@MorningTea 

We can't help you in any detail until you go into Disk Management and post an image of the partition layout of the drive.

Four partitions, on an OEM PC, is not an unusual situation as they are usually: Boot, Recovery, OS, HP_TOOLS. Of these, only the last can be safely removed but it is usually so small as to do no good to do that.

Five partitions will force your PC into a state where it then has only Daynamic Disks -- and you can't do anything useful with the partitions then.

You will basically need to reformat the drive and reinstall Windows to get the full capacity back.

[MorningTea]

This is all that comes up when I open Computer Management and go to Disk Management. Though, when I go to This PC, it shows up with the 70GB parition called " WINDOWS " with a Windows 10 icon, then another partition of 508MB called " Local Disk ".

[WAWood]

@MorningTea 

Thanks for the images and info.

Something's seriously wrong as you should have full rights by default to see the contents of the Disk Management console.  Why you do not, I have no idea.

The formatting does not at all match OEM defaults, as there is no boot partition, no Recover partition, and no HP-TOOLS partition -- so did you (or someone else) do this formatting change.

You said this was your mom's PC, so are you interested at all in doing data recovery to save off some files and folders, or are you just interested in getting a working PC back?

[MorningTea]

Okay, so I found out a way to see the space on the Hard-disk, I remembered that there was another account on this laptop, so I went into that account and looked in the program, I found that the Hard-disk for some reason has 856GB of un-allocated space. So I looked through Google to find a way how to add the space together, and I found out that I have to allocate the un-allocated space, then right-click on the partition that I want to add it to. I tried that, but the " Extend Volume " button was greyed out, and I couldn't get it to un-grey ( If that makes sense ). So I looked on Google again, and found another website that could help me. So I looked through the guide, and it said that, " The partition you want to expand should be right next to the un-allocated space ", and I find that to be very confusing, like how would I move that partition over, so I can expand it? Also, Thank you very much for helping me with my problem that I caused.

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@MorningTea 

OK, thanks for the added info.

You can't actually MOVE partitions; instead, to expand a partition into the unallocated space, that space has to be adjacent to the partition.  IF it's not, you can't expand it that way.

What you CAN do is create a new partition to use the unallocated space, and after you do that, you should move large personal data files from the C: drive into that new drive to free up space on C:

A good free app you can use to do this is Minitool Partition Wizard, which you can download and install from their website.

[MorningTea]

Thank you so much WAWood! I'm pretty sure that the program you suggested worked, as it let me expand the man WINDOWS partition back to it's full capacity when it was new! I'm not sure if it's gonna 100% work, but it seems to be expanding the partition just fine. Again, Thank you very much for all of this help with my HP Pavilion laptop! If I do have any more issues, I will respond this your comments

[MorningTea]

Um, Well. I tried installing EA's Origin game launcher, and the computer needed to restart. So I let it restart, and now it says " Boot Device Not Found " meaning that did Windows 10 get un-installed again???