Well I came home today with the wonderful surprise of seeing a blue screen on my monitor the second i walk into the door. Yay! Well it said i had some boot drive error, i restarted, did the same thing. So I tried to go into safe mode, didnt work. OK so i booted with the xp home cd and ran check disk on my c: drive, and then i figured while i was at it, since my d: drive had been acting a bit weird lately, i decided to check that too. Well after I restarted I was blessed to see my computer boot up, but when i checked the d: drive, i noticed that i only have about 6.5 gigs left. I have a 250gig hitachi hard drive, and i had nearly 100 gigs left. And to top it all off, there are numerous corrupted files that i can't access. Any ideas guys? This is driving me insane.

Did your Hitachi drive come with any drive management software? I know that Western Digital drives come with Data Life Guard and other programs, so I would imagine that the Hitachi has their own too.

If it does, run it as the instructions say, and use it to check your partitions and space.

I had an incident occur with a WD drive I had (80GB). It would show it was only 10GB, and even after using FDISK and formating in windows, it still was only showing as 10GB. I used WD's tools and restored the drive, and it fixed the problem.

Hrmm....well it did come with one, Ontrack disk manager. It has an option to "install" a hard drive for partitioning and formatting. I reaaallly dont want to format though. In the midst of trying to fix this I've recoverd around 50 gigs of space that i was missing before this happened, but that was just from file deletion and whatnot. But now i'm still missing that 100 gigs. The ontrack software came with a disk utility that runs from dos, but when i run it i get a error saying that theres a bad or missing command.com, and it cant run. So if there are any utilites that i could use, its not working. Any other suggestions, I'd like to do anything i can before resorting to formatting.