Hard Drives

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Chriss
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Hard Drives

Post by Chriss » November 6, 2011, 5:18 pm

I've been experiencing some error messages saying "getting low on disc space" on my old PC running Win XP Pro, when I look at the "Computer Management" screen (right click My Computer and click manage) and choose "Disk Management" under "Storage" I see bottom right my HDD "C" drive is 60GB but at the top the same drive shows Capacity of 30GB......?

Is this right and if so where did the other 30GB go????



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jorg
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Post by jorg » November 6, 2011, 5:36 pm

Probably you have two partitions, normally C: and D: ?

If you only see the C: drive then the other partition is not activated. If you activate it you should get another drive of 30GB. Transfer pictures, documents and other data from C: to D: to get more free space on C:

You can also clean drive C: to get some disc space back. CCleaner can be useful to do that, can be downloaded at http://www.piriform.com/

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Post by Chriss » November 6, 2011, 5:49 pm

There are no other partitions, only the "C" drive thats why I asked the question. I checked my laptop and it shows the same capacity bottom and top of the screen. How can I reactivate the lost 30GB, CCleaner just removes unwanted files and cleans up the registry as far as I know?

I don't have any pictures, music, movies on the XP PC, it's mainly for email and skype calls

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Post by Chriss » November 6, 2011, 6:20 pm

Just realised my laptop, running vista, has the C drive file systetm as NTFS for both partitions but the XP PC has the C drive file system FAT32, does this mean anything interesting to cure the problem?

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jorg
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Post by jorg » November 6, 2011, 6:31 pm

That's why i asked if you have two partitions. If you open disk management you see the entire (physical) disk, it sounds like it is a 60 GB HDD, but divided in two equal partitions. With only one partition (C) activated? I don't use XP any more but under Vista you have the option to activate the other partition or expand the active partition.

What sounds strange to me is that 30 GB is not enough if you use the computer only for email and skype.

FAT32 is not the source of the problem, FAT32 should work fine for the things you are doing.

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Post by Chriss » November 6, 2011, 6:44 pm

Was that a question or are you saying I don't have enough capacity? I mainly use this PC for email and skype but I was downloading 4 movies today when the problem started.

How do you activate the extra partition in vista, this may give me a start to find out if I can do the same on XP

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Post by jorg » November 6, 2011, 6:57 pm

I only have a dutch version, so don't know exactly the menu names in english. But if you go to disk management (like you wrote down in you first post), you should see some graphical display. Something like Disc 0 and the size under it, to the right you should see (if i'm right) something like the name of the first drive, letter and size, next to that there should be the not active partition. If you right-click on the part about the C-drive it should give you the option to expand it.

Maybe XP works a little bit the same. If it is not working, you can also try to activate the other 30 GB as drive D.

And yes, the downloading of the 4 movies is probably what started your problem. If you only have one C drive the movies will use a lot of space on that drive. Depending on what your downloading 1 movie can be about 700 MB till 50 GB (full HD bluray disc). Better to store them on a separate drive or partition.

If the moviefiles you are downloading are bigger than 1 GB then FAT32 can also give problems, because FAT32 doesn't support files bigger than 1 GB.

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Post by Chriss » November 6, 2011, 7:05 pm

The graphic next to the part where it says Disk0 with the size below shows the full 60GB, its the list above that shows the C drive and has a bunch of stats about it, in order: volume, layout, type, file system, status, then Capacity of 30GB, then theres free space, % free, fault tolorance and overhead.

But the thing is it only shows a capacity of 30GB when below the graphic shows 60GB

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Post by Stevo » November 6, 2011, 7:19 pm

FAT32 cannot read NTFS, but NTFS can read FAT32 no problem... if your C: partition is formatted FAT32, it wont be able to 'see' a partition that is formatted in NTFS.
I am not necessarily saying you have a D: partition in NTFS format, but if you do, your FAT32 C: partition wont 'see' it.
To confirm this, I recommend a partition program such as 'EASEUS Partition Master' (4.1.1 Professional Edition).
With this software, you can 'see' all info relating to your drives and partitions, and can re-size, rename, reformat in either FAT32 or NTFS, amongst other utilities. If you have a D: partition (or an unformatted area of your Hdd), you'll see it, then just reformat it to FAT32 and your C: partition will 'see' it too.

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Post by Stevo » November 6, 2011, 7:40 pm

Chriss, you can download a free version of EASEUS partition Master here-
http://www.filehippo.com/download_easeu ... ster_home/
It's just over 11MB, so wont take long if you're in town. ;)

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Post by Stevo » November 6, 2011, 8:05 pm

jorg wrote:If the moviefiles you are downloading are bigger than 1 GB then FAT32 can also give problems, because FAT32 doesn't support files bigger than 1 GB.
Sorry jorg, but you are wrong... the maximum file size for FAT32 is 4GB (minus 2 Bytes).

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Post by Chriss » November 6, 2011, 9:06 pm

Ok now this is getting crazy,
Stevo, I downloaded the program and run it and it shows 1 partition, my C drive which is 60GB capacity with a little over 30GB unused... good me thinks I've got 30GB to play with, but when I look at My Computer it shows Total Size of the HDD as 30GB with next to bugger all of free space......

Any ideas???????

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Post by Chriss » November 6, 2011, 10:07 pm

WHOOOHHOOOO

Sorted. Thanks Stevo for introducing me to Easeus, repaired the problem by converting my HDD from FAT32 to NTFS. Now see the full capacity in "My Computer"....... Another problem solved with the help of UM members....

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Post by jorg » November 7, 2011, 4:41 am

Stevo wrote:
jorg wrote:If the moviefiles you are downloading are bigger than 1 GB then FAT32 can also give problems, because FAT32 doesn't support files bigger than 1 GB.
Sorry jorg, but you are wrong... the maximum file size for FAT32 is 4GB (minus 2 Bytes).
Yes, you are correct about that. My bad.

But happy to see that converting to NTFS solved the problem.

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