HDD size reporting errors. 1 Gb instead of 80

[Lloyd Lamere]

After upgrading to SP2, XP Prof. , system reports only 1
Gb space total on the drive, with 246 Mb available.... yet
when you use chkdsk or other tools, it still has about 76
Gb space left. I am unable to run chkdsk /f to repair
this. What can be done to repair this problem. Every
program I try to load now which has any size reports
back "insufficient space" to load the program. We have
tried thru the Repair Consloe already and had no luck in
FIXING the problem, but it DID report ERRORS FOUND when it
ran the check.

It was suggested earlier to chk the partition size. That
is OK. Partition is and was set to full size of drive.
There is about 18 Gb of programs/files on the system now,
but, it now reports hard drive sizing error. It has 1 Gb
total space, and 264 Mb available space, regardless of
what I add to or take from the drive. You can NOT load
any programs over 264 Mb in size to the drive.

We have run complete diagnostics from the Dell utility
partition. Nothing. We have run AVG professional, latest
update, no virii. Have run SpyBot S&D, Spyblaster, and
XSoft spy removing utilities, Nothing found. Simply need
to have a way to run the chkdsk /f utility. THAT would
fix it if XP-SP2 would allow it to run!

 

[Nathan McNulty]

Here is the same response I gave you last time you asked this. Please
look up your old post and follow up to that one next time you ask
questions

Right click on My Computer, click Manage, click Disk Management. This
will show you the space of your hard drive and what partitions there are
on the drive. It is possible that your partition is only 1 GB in size
and the rest is unallocated (meaning it needs to be partitioned and
formatted). See what you can do from that console and post back if you
need more help

 

[Nathan McNulty]

I apologize for my last post as my screen only showed the first
paragraph and then noticed there was more after seeing the scroll bar.
You can check the disk from within Windows by right clicking on the
drive, then go to the utility tab and scan the drive for errors. I
suggest checking both boxes and letting it run at startup. It sounds
like something got messed up with the partition table. This can happen
because of spyware or viruses, but would usually leave your data
unrecoverable. I find it odd that it shows 18 GB of programs, etc.

At this point, I would be backing up all of my data and doing a clean
install of XP if I were at the point you are. For chkdsk /f, you can
always try a Windows 98 Bootdisk, but if you have your drive formatted
NTFS, you will be unable to see the hard drive with that utility.