Hard drive problem

[Grant Baxter]

I have a 200 GB hard drive that I made 2 100 GB (NTFS) partitions on.
The first partition is D and the second is I. In looking at the
properties for I, it shows 100 GB total, 95 GB used, 5 GB free.
However, there are only 30 GB of files on this partition. When I look
at that partition in PerfectDisk, it shows the files that are there,
and the majority of the disk as "Metadata". (The D drive shows what I
expect to see wrt space used and space available.)

How can I recover this space? Would it be alright to copy all files on
I to another drive, and then reformat I?

TIA,

grant

 

[Grant Baxter]

What does your BIOS report for the drive size?

The BIOS sees the right size. XP does also, it just thinks that more
space is used than file sizes on the disk.

grant

 

[Grant Baxter]

Look for *.temp files, internet cache, recycle bin, etc. Especially
if you're running the "Norton Protected Recycle Bin"..... If by
chance you are running NPRB, I recommend turning it off as it's pretty
much useless for file recovery.

Also, check to see how much space you've allocated to system restore.

All of what I mentioned above would not show up as file size space in
Explorer or My Computer. Don't forget to turn on "view system files
and hidden files" under My Computer, Folder Options.

Further update:

I deleted the partition and re-created the partition with
PartitionMagic. I was then able to see the entire partition (100GB). I
then went into the XP repair console and did a chkdsk. It showed 100GB
available. I then did a chkdsk /r. It said it found errors. I again,
only had 37GB of the 100GB available. It looks as though there are
errors on the h/d, but 63GB worth?

grant

 

[CS]

Don't forget the fact that PerfectDisk sees almost all of the unused
space on this disk as "Metadata". On all my other disks, the metadata
totals a couple hundred megabytes per disk at most. I think this is
the key to the lost space, no?

Something isn't right. I also use Perfect Disk (ver 6.0) and very
little shows up as "Metadata" on my 80gb drive formatted to NTFS.
There is a rather large MFT zone but that seems to be taken into
account by the system.

I'm out of ideas on this one. One thing does come to mind though and
I'm not at all very up to date on it.... my understanding is that XP
does have limits on what size hard drive it can "utilize" if a
standard controller is present. I think the limit is 137gb but again
I'm not sure about that. In order to "utilize" very large hard
drives (yours is 200gb) you must have a controller that is capable.

There has been some message traffic regarding this very thing here in
this group. Maybe a search with your newsreader can turn something
up. Or you might want to do a search using Google. In any event,
good luck on resolving your problem. And let us know.....

Regards.