HD size doubled (very strange)

I have a Seagate factory recertified SATA hard drive, 320gb. I hooked it up the other day and started to install WinXP Home SP2. I booted to the OS CD, pressed F6 for the Intel drivers, so far all is good. Then I get to the point where it says "do you want to format" and I say "OK". And then it responds with Disk 0 or drive C: 305243mb (which is normal) and that it has 610486mb free!!! It's saying that my drive has exactly twice the capacity available as free space!!! Freekin' crazy :eek So, any ideas besides "send it back"?
Thanks!

 

sweet!! I want my hard drive to do that

 

have you tried to put a 590GB file on it to see if it actually has that much space?

but seriously if it does actually have that much space i wouldn't send it back...

 

Maybe I didn't explain this clearly. When you install Windows XP, at the beginning, with the blue screens with white letters, you get to the part where it shows your hard drive(s). It shows the hard drive capacity, and on the same line to the right it shows how much free space is in the drive. It reports the capacity as 305423mb (which is normal). Then it says I have 610846mb of free space. How can I have over 600gb of free space on a 300gb hard drive? It really doesn't matter... I've tried to format it using Windows and some 3rd party tools, and they all can't format it. Windows says the partition is damaged or an unrecognized format, a different app came back with "unknown drive", and another said "file system mismatch or unknown" or something real close to that. I think the drive is kaput. I'm going to try using Seagate's utilities, and we'll see if they work....

EDIT- I was just thinking.... maybe if I try to create some partitions instead of trying to format the entire drive... hmmmm.... maybe 2 partitions of 300gb each will work, or 3 partitions of 200gb each.... hmmmmmm.... something to think about....

 

dlb,

Here is an article about something along the lines of what you have mentioned. http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2004/03/09/unused-space-on-hard-drives-recovered.