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Strange HDD problems

V

Vaders

Junior Member
I hate asking for help in my first post here, but this one's got me a bit puzzled. I have a 250GB hard drive - he useable space is 232GB, and the sum total of my files is only about 130GB. Windows XP SP2 is reporting that I have a whopping 3GB free space, which means that about 100 gigs decided, at some point, to up and vanish.

Here's a little more background:

I installed using an original WinXP Pro CD (pre-SP1), so my original partition size was 137GB or whatever the limit is. Afterwards I used Partition Magic to resize the partition to the max size and everything seemed fine. I hadn't been watching my free space because I figured "250 gigs, no problem!" Needless to say I was very surprised to get a low disk space warning the other day.

Here's what I've checked so far...
  • Disabled system restore and deleted restore points - no help
  • Checked hidden files/folders - no help
  • Nothing in the recycle bin (I don't have Norton Antivirus)
  • Ran chkdsk several times - nothing
  • Ran WD Datalifeguard scan - no physical problems with HD
A picture says a thousand words:
Diskkeeper shows the space occupied by mysterious system files
Partition Magic shows crazy percentages in the properties window

Perhaps my partition got screwed up somehow? It's probably something very obvious and stupid, because I tend to miss stupid and obvious things. Anyway, if anyone has ANY ideas, I'd love to hear them.
 
Does Partition Magic show the entire disk as one partition, or is there a section of unused space? If there is an unused scetion, back up your critical data, and try to use Partion magic to re-size your main partition to fill the entire space.
 
The only unallocated space is the 7.8GB at the end of the drive. When I first resized the partition I made it as large as Partition Magic would allow me, and this unused space is just what was left over. If you look at the picture, you can see the same 7.8GB of empty space on the other drives. Isn't it normal to have a certain amount of unused space like this?
 
The Partition Magic is often used in a very large number of hard drive problems that people have. For this reason, I really dislike this program and have never used it. Resizing a partition is a dangerous activity and should only be accomplished as a last resort. Microsoft's NTFS filesystem is proprietary and any partition resizing tools need to have reverse-engineered NTFS. Partition Magic does not have this reverse-engineering correct in my opinion. However, this could merely be a situation that this tool is used more often so it will naturally be a part of more problems, similar to MS Windows as compared to Linux.

There are more reliable tools available for partition resizing, if this is really needed to be done, such as QTPartEd. This tool is better available in the installation routine of various linux distributions. I remember Mandrake used it very effectively and assume the Mandriva installation ISO as far back as v9.2 should be good.

No, it is not normal to have 7.8GB of unintentionally unpartitioned space on a hard drive.
Yes, this partition is definitely screwed up.

What MS Windows Service Pack is currently installed?

It appears the original installation with MS Windows XP SP1 did not recognize more than 137GB of the drive. I presume the drive was resized with Partition Magic before WinXP SP2 was installed. WinXP SP2, contains the drivers necessary to recognize drives larger than 137GB. WinXP SP2 should have been installed first before an attempt at resizing the partition. (Is this SP1 or SP2, I cannot remember now.)

The proper drivers were missing and instead of installing the proper drivers, the drive was resized. It appears the resizing of the partition was allowed through a bug within either WinXP or Partition Magic but the operating system is still unable to view the entire partition.

My recommendation is to copy all data and configuration information off the drive and perform a completely new OS installation, starting with repartitioning the drive partitions.

WinXP SP2 should be the first thing installed after the OS completes intallation. However, SP2 may need to be slipstreamed into the installation CD to make partition recognition work properly from the beginning.

I have not dealt with partition recognition for a while so do not remember the exact tricks to recognize the whole hard drive. The drive manufacturer, or possibly even the computer reseller (Dell, ...), should have a utility that will install drivers to recognize the entire hard drive.

Hopefully other people can provide more information on how to recognize the full partition.
 
Out of curiosity, what does drive management show?

right-click My Computer | select Manage | select Storage/Disk Management
 
Thanks for the input, both of you. I do realize that I can certainly fix the problem by wiping the drive, recreating the partition, and starting over. But I was hoping that there might be some way to avoid doing this because it is always a long and cumbersome process to reinstall programs, etc. In response to Chusteczka, I DID install SP2 BEFORE resizing the partition. I will probably wait a day or two and see if anyone else has any ideas. If not, it looks like I'll be in for a few hours of Windows installation fun.
 
I do not believe it is possible to recover from this situation since it appears the filesystem is messed up. This happens sometimes when working with full partition recognition and Partition Magic.

If or when you do reinstall the system, ensure the whole drive is recognized by the bios first.
Then ensure the whole drive is recognized within the drive partitioning and formatting routine during the first stage of the WinXP install.
If either of these two do not occur, then return here to get help with the full drive recognition.

Western Digital's DataLifeguard utility may help with full drive recognition before the OS is installed.

Does the bios recognize the full capacity of the hard drive now?

My response to an incomplete drive recognition by Windows has been to partition the drive before the WinXP installation by using a different operating system. I used FreeBSD's sysinstall routine to partition the drive first and this would always recognize the whole drive if the full drive was recognized in the bios. Then I would install WinXP by reformatting the partition created by FreeBSD. This is why I am uncertain how to handle this drive recognition problem in windows.
 
Sounds like you got one of those older motherboards with the BIOS that is affected by that '137GB limitation problem'. I'd just reinstall everything, and this time make sure you follow the correct guidelines for installing your 250GB drive so that Windows sees the whole drive and not just 137! I had this problem several years ago with an old PII system and remember when i got my first 250GB Western Digital drive it came with excellent installation instructions that addressed this issue specifically.
 
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