Hard Drive Reading 5G when it is a 40G

Hmmm.......

I went to defrag the old puter my sons use for the internet. It is a Pentium 2, 350, with 256 megs of SD Ram.

I have had this thing since 1998, it came with Windows 98 (pre SE). It now has XP with SP2 installed. It has been installed for well over a year.

Also, It was my primary computer for several years and I had a ton of stuff on it. I think at one point there was about 23G of memory used.

Anyway, I go to defrag and run a few utilites to keep it clean and defrag tells me not enough resources to run....

I ran C Cleaner, Adaware and disk Cleanup before delving into the problem. My son is 10 and who knows if he had 4 million pics etc on the thing.....

Long story short, properties shows a 5G drive and Disk Management confirms this and shows no other partition! What, did 35 G's just quit and go home???

So, any ideas on why the HD is being shown as 5 Gig with no other partition? Maybe a brain fart on my behalf, but darned if I can figure it out.......

 

What file system are you using? NTFS? Also, does disk management show any unpartitioned space on the drive?

 

Howdy!

File system is FAT 32 and no unpartitioned space shows up.
Still baffles me....

 

What brand hard drive is it? Try downloading and running the diagnostic tool made for your HDD.

Maxtor:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Maxtor_Powermax_d1386.html

Seagate:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Seagate_SeaTools_d2858.html

Western Digital:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Western_Digital_Data_Lifeguard_Tools_d2855.html

IBM/Hitachi:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/IBM_-_Hitachi_Drive_Fitness_Test_d2828.html

 

Maybe try "defrag" from SAFE mode. I've never had to do it from SAFE mode, so proceed at own risk.

You can try scandisk and/or chkdsk from Start--Run.

Type cmd and press <enter>. Then chkdsk and <enter>, or scandisk and <enter>.
These should report on maximum and minimum space on hard drive.
Chkdsk is quicker than scandisk to provide an answer for you. Let us know the results, one way or the other. Bazza

 

yeah, jumper is one thing of this problem, Do you try partition magic?