[fnark]

I recently bought a diamond plus 9 (i think) 160GB HDD. I installed it, and it said that it had 152 GB space, i know that this is normal to lose a little space so i didnt think much of it. i installed about 6 GB of games, and thought it might make sense to defrag it. just after starting to defrag my comp crashed and i had to restart, BIOS was now giving errors about the hard drive, and its name on the IDE section of the bios was all strange. i opened up my case, unplugged the cables and plugged them back in and booted up. this time it booted up fine and i did a thourough scan on the disk. It all seems to be working fine now, but its only saying i have 120GB of space!! Im fien with losing 10, but 30 just seems a little silly. Wheres my space gone??

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BIOS was now giving errors about the hard drive, and its name on the IDE section of the bios was all strange

What errors is it giving?
Why does it look strange?

Sounds like the BIOS might be having trouble detecting the drive, try a BIOS update.
After you've updated the BIOS run chkdsk again.

What version of Windows are you running?

[ZEUS_GB]

BIOS was now giving errors about the hard drive, and its name on the IDE section of the bios was all strange

What errors is it giving?
Why does it look strange?

Sounds like the BIOS might be having trouble detecting the drive, try a BIOS update.
After you've updated the BIOS run chkdsk again.

What version of Windows are you running?

[austin_o]

Another factor to consider is binary vs decimal representation. For example, my "160 Gig" decimal hard drive actually is 149 Gig binary. For additional insight, check out a faq at seagate:

http://www.seagate.c...ty_measure.html

Edited by austin_o, 07 February 2006 - 08:24 AM.

[shard92]

Another thing to consider... What OS are you running. Some os's only support up to 120 GB. Oh it also matters which service pack you have for each.

[Murray S.]

Howdy:

Also, as it appears you are running XP Pro, you have to take into account the fact that XP reserves 12% of your hard-drive for the System Restore folder.. combine that with hidden system files and folders and yo could have your difference!!

Murray

[p-zero]

First things first, how old is the comp? You might have to update your BIOS, I just installed a 400GB seagate drive after initial boot up it only showed 127 GB. I had to update my BIOS to a newer version so it would see all 400GB. In your set-up screen set the hardrive that its on to auto, this will auto detect your drive space. Re-boot, open set-up and it should read 160 under the HD. Then, make sure your XP has all of the recent updates and service pack 2 (anything prior to SP2 wont detect all of the HD space above 130GB or so). Re-boot, when windows opens run your HD setup disk, there should be an option for partitions and "find lost space" - or something like that, run it and it should detect it. And yes system restore takes up A LOT of space on mine something like 10 GB, Im planning on disabling it very soon, seeing as it never works any [bleep] way.
-Pete.

Edited by p-zero, 07 February 2006 - 02:56 PM.

[fnark]

I dont have SP2, jsut standard XP pro, i will download sp2 and see if it helps. ill update my bios aswell, although that reports it as 160gb fine now, when i was having errors the name in the BIOS was showing some odd characters, dollar signs and Y's.
Thanks for the help everyone