Sturmvogel Posted December 14, 2006 Share Posted December 14, 2006 Long story short...I needed to do a system recovery on my laptop. Some things were bugging about its performance. I had a lot of updating ahead of me. Now, I didn't look at the HD before installing Service Pack 2. All I know is that Windows is reporting my HD size as around 9GB instead of 74GB. Same with the amount of HD used. It's way off. I've tried doing some research into it on my on (and google) and haven't come up with anything. CHKDISK didn't find errors. Any suggestions? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shibathedog Posted December 14, 2006 Share Posted December 14, 2006 did you format with FAT32? Windows is retarded about FAT32 HDDs, unless you have an app like Partition Magic you should format as NTFS Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sturmvogel Posted December 14, 2006 Author Share Posted December 14, 2006 The file system of my HDD is FAT32. It was such before I did the system recovery and after. I've ran across some info about how XP doesn't handle HDD's larger than 32GB very well. But seeing as there was no problem with that when I first got my laptop, and it is restored to its factory settings.... Update: Did some more searching into the problem, and it seems it is SP2 related. Upon looking at Disk Management, it shows 64GB of unallocated space. I guess that's the missing part. I think I may have to resolve this with partitioning of some sort. Not an area I'm familiar with. Unless there are better ideas. Here's a look at it: Disk Management Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ken_cinder Posted December 14, 2006 Share Posted December 14, 2006 That sure is wierd, but it could be an indication of a drive on it's last legs.I'd format that unallocated space, enable S.M.A.R.T. on the drive and run a S.M.A.R.T. program and see what's up. I had a 30GB drive crap out last year for no apparant reason, S.M.A.R.T. reported it had simply outrun it's lifecycle or something.Bunch of bullshit IMO, I'm starting to think failure is a built-in feature of newer drives, as I have several older, smaller drives that still work like they're new. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sturmvogel Posted December 14, 2006 Author Share Posted December 14, 2006 I don't see an option to enable SMART, at least not in the bios. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ken_cinder Posted December 15, 2006 Share Posted December 15, 2006 Motherboard details? Mfg + Make + Model. I realize it's a laptop, but you should be able to obtain this information with something like Everest/SiSoft Sandra if you don't know otherwise. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sturmvogel Posted December 15, 2006 Author Share Posted December 15, 2006 Acer Aspire 1800....that's all really Everest says for Motherboard name. Motherboard chip set is Intel Grantsdale i915P. From what I've seen, it doesn't appear my HDD is going bad, but I still can't rule that out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ken_cinder Posted December 15, 2006 Share Posted December 15, 2006 Read the manual on Acer's site for your leptop, and it wasn't helpful AT ALL. Just get yourself a SMART utility and check things out. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. Your laptop is considerably newer than my desktop, and even it supports SMART. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sturmvogel Posted December 15, 2006 Author Share Posted December 15, 2006 I used two utilities, Active SMART 2.51 and HDDLife. Both indicate that my HDD is in good shape, Active Smart being the more in-depth. Both health and performance are indicated GOOD, and the SMART analysis reports no problems. I guess the only thing left to work on is allocating the 64GB. I don't see an option to format it, either through XP or the utility. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shibathedog Posted December 15, 2006 Share Posted December 15, 2006 speedfan actually is pretty good for smart info and yeah i noticed that too, I think companies are making the drives die after a certain amount of time just to avoid being liable in any way for any data lost or corrupted after a certain amount of time somehow but then again that doesn't really make sense either because the drives are dying >_< Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sturmvogel Posted December 15, 2006 Author Share Posted December 15, 2006 Well....I decided to create a partition of the 64GB of unallocated space. So now I have my one partition (used to be my primary) that is about 9.7GB, and the 64GB is the other, now in NTFS. I assume I won't run into any trouble with this setup. Forget about the fact that i have such a scewed partition going. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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