HD partition not showing contents

lukin

I have a 40 GB HD which is formatted into four parts of 9.30 GB each.
One partition (the last one) is showing up 9.30 GB in 'My Computer' but it says that there is 5.4 GB used and the rest is free.
However, there is nothing at all on that partition!
I've tried formatting it in Windows, scannning it for errors, etc but no change.
It's probably just damaged and there's nothing that I can do about it but maybe someone can suggest something.
It's only about a year old, like.

daveg

You could try usgin Fdisk to delete all the partitions and then start again.

Drazhar

try getting something like Partition Magic.

Check you PM's Lurkin

The_Conductor

What are you formatting the partition with?
FAT16/FAT32/NTFS or something more exotic?
40Gb means 40,000,000,000 bytes- there being 8 bits in a byte and 1024 bytes in a megabyte, and 1000Mb in 1Gb therefore 40Gb does not equal 40Gb of usable space (its a marketing ploy).
When you format it you end up with a lot less than 40Gb.
have you previously had the whole drive formatted as a single partition? What size did it report?
How about a low level format?
What is the drive?

lukin

Crikey, that's a lot of questions smccarrick, here goes:
It's a Maxtor drive and it's FAT 32.

40Gb means 40,000,000,000 bytes- there being 8 bits in a byte and 1024 bytes in a megabyte, and 1000Mb in 1Gb therefore 40Gb does not equal 40Gb of usable space (its a marketing ploy).

I know that, but that's already accounted for when you factor in the drive space I am missing from ( x 9.30 = 37.2)
Thre's no way I should be missing 5.30 Gb from one of those partitions as well.
I never had it as a single partition.
I don't want to reformat it as I will lose everythng on it (even though it's all backed up on another drive)

The_Conductor

Ontrack do a nice little hard-drive utility aptly enough called "Fix-It Utilities". It diagnoses all sorts of hard-drive failure and will attempt repairs where a lot of other utilities tell you to sod off. don't know whether its worth getting for a once off use though.
BTW- Every time you add an extra partition to a hard-drive a rake of sectors are marked as unwritable- its the equivalent of a demarcation zone between the different sectors. I always thought it wasn't more than a few hundred meg- but might be an idea to see- given that you have 4 partitions you have definitely lost a good bit there. Its the same way you loose 148k between every different track when you are burning a CD.......

Maxtors drives aren't known to be the most reliable around, but they are cheap and cheerful, and don't have a high failure rate (unlike those crabby Fujitsu drives). If all the other partitions are reading and writing fine- I would be damned with it and repartition a single extended partition. Unless you have a BIOS that will not support large partition sizes give it a blast and see what happens. You have your data backed up in any case. Sounds like a nice little project for over Christmas?

lukin

Yeah, I wanted to buy that Ontrack SystemSuite thingy a while ago but couldn't afford it.
It's spose to be good.