Where does 1GB go?

[Jean]

Greetings:

I had several partitions on my 60GB HD. The first partition was XP Home SP2 and was originally installed by Dell. After installing XP Prof SP2 into the second partition, I boot to XP Prof and delete everything I can in the first partition, all the folders including windows. The only thing left is the root directory, Volume system folder, empty Admin folder, and several files in it Boot.ini, ntldr, ntdetect etc and there isn't swap file. However, when I run disk management and explorer applets , both report that it still has 1.2GB used. Am I missing something? Where can I get rid of this 1.2GB to reclaim the wasted disk space.

Note, this is a laptop and it doesn't equiped with neither internal or external floppy. However, I believe it does recognize an external HD via USB port.

Thank you for your time and help.

 

[csamuels]

boot to a win98 cd. run fdisk. delete and recreate your parititions. reboot to cd. format partitions.

 

[Eltano1]

Csamuels, are you reccomending to reformat his whole HDD? or I 'm misreading you?

Eltano

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Originally posted by: Eltano1
Csamuels, are you reccomending to reformat his whole HDD? or I 'm misreading you?

Eltano

Yes. If you're installing your own OS anyways and not preserving any of the Dell OEM, why wouldn't you just blank it all in the first place? 😕

- M4H

 

[Phoenix86]

Enable show hidden files from explorer.

M4H, one good reason is recovery... I don't know if Dell is doing this (yet?) but Compaq's have the original image on a hidden partition on the HDD. Not a bad idea considering drive sizes. If they don't give you an original install CD it may be the only way do to a restore. Also, if he they ever need tech support, he may be asked to re-format before they replace hardware. Just an FYI. Personally I detest systems w/o original install media because of all the add-junk the OEM adds.

 

[Abzstrak]

my guess is its the MFT

 

[toant103]

Originally posted by: Jean
Greetings:

I had several partitions on my 60GB HD. The first partition was XP Home SP2 and was originally installed by Dell. After installing XP Prof SP2 into the second partition, I boot to XP Prof and delete everything I can in the first partition, all the folders including windows. The only thing left is the root directory, Volume system folder, empty Admin folder, and several files in it Boot.ini, ntldr, ntdetect etc and there isn't swap file. However, when I run disk management and explorer applets , both report that it still has 1.2GB used. Am I missing something? Where can I get rid of this 1.2GB to reclaim the wasted disk space.

Note, this is a laptop and it doesn't equiped with neither internal or external floppy. However, I believe it does recognize an external HD via USB port.

Thank you for your time and help.

i think dell created their own partition with dianogtic utilties. Go to your admin tools to check it out.

check it out in disk management

 

[Jean]

The reason I am reluctant to reformat is I want to preserve the Dell MBR menu. Effectively, Dell install a system restore in such a way that it won't work, I modify the MBR.

For several hours I can't find where is the 1GB goes. So I have no other choice than reformat the first partition. I was cloning the entire HD to an external one before reformatting, in case something happening and in case I have to send it back for servicing.

Thank you all for your valuable suggestion and input.

 

[Lmronby]

I recently found a 1 gig file that was hidden on my comp. It was hiber.sys. This file is reseverd space for when your system goes into hibernate mode and stores the contents of mem to disk. You normally would boot into that OS and disable hibernate options and that frees the disk space. But try looking at the partition via dos and look for any kind of file that way. Good luck.

 

[Jean]

Thanks for your help.

I already disable Hibernate. Anyway, I reformat and re-install the OS from scratch. 🙂