HARDDISK SIZE MISMATCHING

[Tetsuo]

Having read some of the problems/replies, I hope someone can help with a problem I am having...

I have two HDD's running on a P133 on an Intel VX-Pro Board with Win95 OSR2. One HDD is a 4.1GB Maxtor IDE drive connected as the Primary Master, partioned into 3 fairly equal parts of 1.3GB. The Other is 9.1 Quantum AtlasII SCSI harddisk connected to a adaptec 1542C card. However on this drive I get only about 8GB in size (I have been told some space is lost anyway on large drives, and this size is correct).
This SCSI drive is partitioned into 4x2GB drives.

My problem is that although my SCSI partions are 2GB in size, I have found I am missing space!!! Recently I copied a couple of CD's (CorelDraw 7) onto one of my partions expecting all three CDs of about 550MB (hence 3x550MB=1.65GB) to fit onto the parition, but found that two CDs took up 1.7GB instead of 1.1GB.

I found that when selecting the two copied CD directories in Win95, and right clicking 'Properties' the combined folder size is reported as 1.1GB, but when clicking on the partition drive letter and right clicking 'Properties' there is 1.7GB of reported data used instead of 1.1GB.

There is only one hidden/system file of a mere 32K, no other files etc on the drive (even the recycle bin has been set to use no space).

I found the same problem on all my drives/partitions i.e. one size is used but another grossly larger reported to be used.

this is especially highlighted in DOS when doing 'dir *.* /s' reports total file use as 1.1GB but doing 'chkdsk' on the same drive reports use as 1.7GB (but the reported free space is always the same as 0.3GB).

There are about 500 subdirectories but even these should not account for a 600MB approx. disk space loss!

Is this anything to do with only partial clusters being used (scandisk, and defrag show very little / NO partially used clusters).

Sorry to ramble like this, but this is the first time I've run out of space on a drive and would really like to know where the space is.

Would changing to FAT32 resolve this? How is this done?

Thanks.

[Pantion]

Your problem is indeed the FAT... I suppose you made so many partitions due to the FAT16 limitations. And if you did then the cluster size on those partitions are of 32K which means a single file of even 0 bytes will take up 32K... change to FAT32 and that should do it.

And with FAT32 you can make larger partitions if you want too instead of so many small ones.

[Tetsuo]

Without wanting to sound too stupid, how do I change my HDD's to FAT32 from FAT16?

Thanks for your help!

[Axel]

not to worry - the stupid ones are those who don't ask questions.......

you might also check out that your BIOS is current, could be an upgrade will help. Sorry, don't know about how to convert to FAT 32, but what little I know of that , it sounds like the best route.

[bobcat]

If you are running w98..windows has a converter that you can install. Your best bet is to use Partition Magic.

[Flash]

Somebody please have a look at this, it is sort of relevant but i am getting desperate!

Thanks in advance.
http://www.sysopt.com/forum/Forum2/HTML/002984.html

[Tetsuo]

I am running Win95 OSR2, and have been unable to find anything on Win95 to convert to FAT32.

[toms111]

Although w95b supports Fat32, it does't allow conversion of an existing partition from fat16 to fat32. you have three choices:

1. Buy w98 which includes a system utility to convert a previously created Fat16 partition to Fat32.

2. Buy partion magic which can also convert a previously created Fat16 partition to Fat32.

3. Free solution. If you stand to loose the data from a partion that you want to change, use fdisk. Select option to enable lage disk support. Delete the existing partions and create new partitions. Reboot and format the new partition. By enabling large disk support, fdisk will create only fat 32 partitions.

Good luck.

[This message has been edited by toms111 (edited 10-22-1999).]

[doodoo]

My case is even worse then yours.
Windows displays my drive as a 12.9GB device but shows it as 135,584,153,60 bytes.
'Really' my drive is the 13.5GB.. Hmm.. the strange thing is,with the space that I should have, when I was in DOS, I could not set another FAT32 partition.

The worst of all is - I could only use 12.9GB for storage!!

Maybe a misconfiguration or just a bug with Windows or the DOS OS?? What could be the problem? Thanks!