NegativeSpace Posted March 4, 2012 Share Posted March 4, 2012 It's certainly not as interesting and exciting as the regular stuff around here but it has me completely dumb and I can not figure out how to fix it or what is causing it! See pictures, they are screenshots taken on the same machine with the same HDD, one of GParted, one of Win disk manager, and another of Windows disk properties tab. The correct density is reported in GParted, but it incorrectly shows 257GiB of space used, when it should only be about 25GB or 30GB. Also, Windows disk manager shows my recovery partition as being 13GB in size, with 13GB free, which it should not be. Need some help here. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digip Posted March 5, 2012 Share Posted March 5, 2012 (edited) Hmm. 298 for Disk 0 - 13GB, leaves you with the 284GB. The 100mb is reserved, for windows system, boot, or whatever it was setup for. The fact that C's capacity is 284GB does not mean all of that is usable. You have to take into consideration reserved space for automatic recovery, something that might be set to 12% of the drive or whatever ratio you set it to, plus the paging file, which I am not sure if it shows as used space or just not calculated with available and used space. Something does seem to not at up though with the 42.37GB for Drive C that is usable(used plus unused showing) when the capacity is 284GB. What I would do is, clean the recycling bin, adjust your reserved space for automatic restore points, check how much memory you have set for Virtual Ram, and then run a defrag and check again, see what happens. Virtual Memory used: System Restore Point Space used: Edited March 5, 2012 by digip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NegativeSpace Posted March 5, 2012 Author Share Posted March 5, 2012 Hmm. 298 for Disk 0 - 13GB, leaves you with the 284GB. The 100mb is reserved, for windows system, boot, or whatever it was setup for. The fact that C's capacity is 284GB does not mean all of that is usable. You have to take into consideration reserved space for automatic recovery, something that might be set to 12% of the drive or whatever ratio you set it to, plus the paging file, which I am not sure if it shows as used space or just not calculated with available and used space. Something does seem to not at up though with the 42.37GB for Drive C that is usable(used plus unused showing) when the capacity is 284GB. What I would do is, clean the recycling bin, adjust your reserved space for automatic restore points, check how much memory you have set for Virtual Ram, and then run a defrag and check again, see what happens. Thanks for the response. I wish I had just used all of that space, but as this is 30 or so hours after a clean install (less the 11MB 'recovery tools' partition and the 13GB Windows image partition) I'm afraid it can't be explained by the usual windows disk wasters. I'm pretty sure something went wrong with the reinstall, because a week ago when i bought the computer new, before I screwed up the bootloader and partition flags, Windows reported the HDD as having a capacity of 298GB or so with about the same amount used then as is used now. If I add up the contents of the drive, the data comes up to about 14GB (without the 100MB and 13GB partitions). Any other ideas? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digip Posted March 5, 2012 Share Posted March 5, 2012 Sounds like you didn't completely format all of the old data off the drive and its not being reported as available or in use, possibly due to bad partition data, and only installed to the remaining free space on the Drive. Windows Vista and 7 use 20GB for windows install alone so you need at least 30-40GB for install if you want to be able to run it, but more for program and swap space. I would say if this is a new box, you need to fdisk it and nuke every partition, make sure no bad partition data is on the drive eating up space you can't install to, including the reserved and 13GB image, make sure its formatted completely, not a quick format, of all drive space and reclaim 100% of the drive. Then create a new partition to install to and use the entire disk if you want just windows on it. If you wanted to dual boot, cut it in half, format half as NTFS, leave other half alone, then you could put Linux on the other half, but if you tried wiping this out from when you bought it and it only shows this small amount of usable space, you foobared something somewhere. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NegativeSpace Posted March 5, 2012 Author Share Posted March 5, 2012 (edited) Sounds like you didn't completely format all of the old data off the drive and its not being reported as available or in use, possibly due to bad partition data, and only installed to the remaining free space on the Drive. Windows Vista and 7 use 20GB for windows install alone so you need at least 30-40GB for install if you want to be able to run it, but more for program and swap space. I would say if this is a new box, you need to fdisk it and nuke every partition, make sure no bad partition data is on the drive eating up space you can't install to, including the reserved and 13GB image, make sure its formatted completely, not a quick format, of all drive space and reclaim 100% of the drive. Then create a new partition to install to and use the entire disk if you want just windows on it. If you wanted to dual boot, cut it in half, format half as NTFS, leave other half alone, then you could put Linux on the other half, but if you tried wiping this out from when you bought it and it only shows this small amount of usable space, you foobared something somewhere. I think its probably true that the old data was not overwritten, since I tried to reinstall Windows a couple times and the machine still would not boot Windows. I guess the data that was written to the Windows partition from the recovery partition just got written several times, each time adding to the amount of data that was being stored on the disk. In other words, it seems like there are 3 copies of everything. I just don't understand why the reporting of space used as opposed to total size of partitions and free space is so inconsistent. Partition Master says the 13GB partition has 8.5GB used and 4.4GB free. Windows Says the same partition has 13GB free and 0GB used. Partition Master says the "Acer" Partition has 15.1GB used and 269.8GB free. Windows says the same partition has 15.1GB used and 27.2GB free. Similar discrepancies are shown with other software as well. GParted reports teh correct 298GB main partition size, but with 250 soemthing GB used. Can I check the master file table or partition flags or something like that to correct the discrepancies without having to blow out the entire disk? If I have to format all 3 partitions I will lose Windows ebcause I don't have a USB HDD to use for backing up the disk first. If I could correct those problems, I could then just delete whatever redundant copies of Windows files that are present. As it is now, I can't even see any of those files, much less delete them. Edited March 5, 2012 by NegativeSpace Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digip Posted March 5, 2012 Share Posted March 5, 2012 You need a windows install disk. Personally, I would just wipe it all out and start fresh, but if you don't have a windows install disk, or an external drive to backup your stuff to, you're pretty much SOL. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NegativeSpace Posted March 6, 2012 Author Share Posted March 6, 2012 (edited) You need a windows install disk. Personally, I would just wipe it all out and start fresh, but if you don't have a windows install disk, or an external drive to backup your stuff to, you're pretty much SOL. I certainly would prefer to install an OEM copy of W7 and get rid of the garbage aftermarket software and extra partitions and just start fresh. I don't have any idea where I would locate a W7 install disc these days. I guess I could buy a copy for about $70 dollars, and a USB op drive for another $40 at best, which I would have no use for after the install. This sucks! Here goes a Windows partition format reinstall. Hope it works. Does anyone have any other ideas? Edit: This round of reinstall seems to have done the trick. Hopefully the same thing didn't happen before I noticed it last time! I would love to know exactly what would cause such a strange mismatch in HDD space records/reports. Edited March 6, 2012 by NegativeSpace Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Infiltrator Posted March 6, 2012 Share Posted March 6, 2012 For $70 dollars, I'm not sure if you can buy one, unless if it's a second hand. Normally Windows Installation CDs cost more than $100.00 depending on the version. OEM versions are the cheapest ones, but the retail ones are the costly ones. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digip Posted March 6, 2012 Share Posted March 6, 2012 Windows 7 pro 64 bit can be bought for about $100 on new egg, and thats the full version, not an upgrade. Thats where I get mine when I build machines. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NegativeSpace Posted March 7, 2012 Author Share Posted March 7, 2012 For $70 dollars, I'm not sure if you can buy one, unless if it's a second hand. Normally Windows Installation CDs cost more than $100.00 depending on the version. OEM versions are the cheapest ones, but the retail ones are the costly ones. For 150 I would probably just use some laptop flavored Linux distro and forget about using Windows. Luckily I have figured everything out with a little help so I wont have to resort to that. There are a few things I can only do with Windows, so I'm glad I got it working agian. I have enough HDD space on a netbook for several operating systems and as much software as I would ever care to have. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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