Solved Part of HDD Unusable

[Connor2524]

Hello,

I bought a Dell Inspiron Duo in December 2011, and it has been fine up until a couple of weeks ago, when the 2 OS's that were installed (Windows 7 Home Premium & Windows 8 Consumer Preview) had suddenly disappeared, so I got hold of Windows 7 Ultimate, but when I went to install it, I realised that the 320GB that I had before had gone down to just 298GB, as well as losing all of my files and programs, this space does not show up in any partitioning programs either, it just shows the single partition with Windows 7 Ultimate on it.

Is there any way to get this unusable space back, or am I stuck with a smaller hard drive?

Thanks in advance,
Connor

 

[essenbe]

welcome to Seven Forums. What size hard drive is it and how much space does it show? 298Gb is the correct formatted size for a 320GB hard drive. Do you have an OS installed now? If so please right click computer, select manage, in the left column select disk management, expand the screen so we can see the top and bottom and post a screenshot.

 

[Connor2524]

Thankyou for replying to my post,

I currently have Windows 7 Ultimate installed on the machine, and it has been working fine, and 298GB is not the correct formatted size for the hard drive, as I was able to use the full 320GB before the OS's had gone. Below are some screenshots that will hopefully show what I mean

 

[TVeblen]

Two suggestions:

First, find out what brand of hard drive you have and then go to the manufacturer's website and download, burn, and run the Diagnostic Program for the hard drive. See if it passes without errors.

Second, download and rum Partition Wizard (or any other good partitioning software) and see if it reads all the space on the drive.

Two things may be going on here:

• The drive is failing and W7 Ultimate formatted it ignoring the bad sectors.
• The drive is sold as a 320GB drive but because of a well known discrepancy between the way hard drives are sold and how OS's read the space you are just seeing the actual usable space for the first time.

 

[Connor2524]

Would HDTUNE work for this? I can't seem to find a diagnostics tool on the Hitachi website

 

[sk0t0s]

This is like My Thread

marsmimar replied:

We humans use 1000MB as equal to 1GB. Computers say 1024MB = 1GB. If you divide out 500GB (500,000,000,000 bytes) by 1024 by 1024 by 1024, it comes out to 465.661GB. Manufacturers like to use the base 10 system because the consumer thinks he's getting a true 500GB drive.

so you have 320GB (320,000,000,000 byte) divide by 1024 by 1024 by 1024 = 298.0232GB.

hope you got the idea.

thanks to marsmimar for easy explanation

 

[Connor2524]

Well this makes a lot of sense, but how was I able to use 320GB (or a lot closer to 320GB) before the OS's uninstalled themselves?

 

[sk0t0s]

Well this makes a lot of sense, but how was I able to use 320GB (or a lot closer to 320GB) before the OS's uninstalled themselves?

That i dont have any idea.

Here's the thing. For every 500gb that i bought, im ending up having 465gb everytime. So I thought I suppose to have only 465gb in every 500gb HDD.

 

[Connor2524]

May it be because that every time it has been sent back to dell for repairs (completely separate problem) they have reinstalled the OS, and they may have a different way of maintaining the 320GB? as I had to reformat the hard drive to the NTFS File system in order to install Windows 7 Ultimate.

 

[DeaconFrost]

Every Dell system I've had delivered with Windows 7 used NTFS. It isn't possible to use more than the stated space, so what makes you think you were, or where were you checking previously to see more than 298 or so total GBs?

 

[Connor2524]

I can definitely remember being able to use more than just 298GB, if I was always getting 298GB of usable space on my HDD, as stated in My Computer, I wouldn't have started this thread, and I didn't say that the HDD wasn't NTFS, although the hard drive was in FAT32 before I had to reformat it to NTFS in order to install Windows 7 Ultimate.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

I didn't say that the HDD wasn't NTFS, although the hard drive was in FAT32

Can you rephrase that?

I'm apparently misunderstanding something.

 

[Connor2524]

Basically, I used to have Windows 7 Home Premium, and the hard drive then would offer me 320GB (or at least closer than 298GB) with the NTFS file system, then a couple of weeks or so ago, the OS at the time had erased itself and the file system of the HDD had changed to FAT32. I then proceeded to install Windows 7 Ultimate, and I had to format the HDD back to NTFS, but when I finally managed to log in, My Computer only showed up with 298GB of usable space. Would having a 40GB partition for Windows 8 Consumer Preview have affected it?

 

[DeaconFrost]

Having the 40 GB would have lowered your total available space from 298 GB to roughly 258 GB. The point we're trying to make is that you may have misread something along the way. I do have to agree, it's very tough to follow what happened. OSes don't erase themselves and convert a drive to FAT32 on their own.

As detailed above, your drive's actual maximum is 298 GB of space...so anything you would be dealing with would always have to be equal to or lesser than that. That's why I was asking where you saw that you were using more. It's possible some application may have been telling you that you had a 320 GB hard drive, rather than reporting actual space.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

then a couple of weeks or so ago, the OS at the time had erased itself and the file system of the HDD had changed to FAT32.......................Would having a 40GB partition for Windows 8 Consumer Preview have affected it?

No, I wouldn't expect Window 8 to have anything to do with this.

Tell us more about the OS erasing itself.

Have you done complete malware scans?

I never heard of a 320 GB drive providing anything other than 298 GB when formatted NTFS.

 

[Connor2524]

well, I am presuming there may have been some sort of malware that may have done this from an email? as I realised about a week after the problem that my friend's email address was sending most of it's contacts spam emails, and it all looked pretty genuine, until I showed them the email and they said that they didn't send it. I'm guessing that the file that was downloaded when the link was clicked was malware, as it was something posing as an antivirus, as I didn't have one installed and the email had said that my friend liked it and that he recommended it to me. so would this kind of thing be the cause of the problem in the first place?

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Malware may well have caused the OS erasing itself issue.

I would be highly skeptical of anything that ever told me I had other than 298 GB formatted capacity with an NTFS file system on a 320 GB drive.

Do you have any reason to believe you are free of malware now??

 

[Connor2524]

Yes, I went out and bought myself McAfee antivirus, seemed good, as when I clicked on the same link again as to test it, it came up as being unsafe, so hopefully there will be no more problems!

I'd just like to thank everyone so much for their help, and for showing me how the usable HDD size tends to be a lot lower than the actual size.

Connor

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Yes, I went out and bought myself McAfee antivirus

I'm sorry to hear that.

McAfee would be the last choice of most here. But what's done is done.

You'll likely need our help if you ever decide to uninstall it.

 

[Connor2524]

If I ever change my mind about the antivirus, what do you think would be the best one?