Strange Hidden Partition.

[gum digger]

Hi
I have a hdd which is 80GB/ 75GB usable space. It use to be 75GB now its only 30Gb. I thought this was a hidden partition so i went to disk management from Admin tools but it only shows 30 GIG there. I also tried latest partition magic no luck. Also tried tools on Hirens bootcd. But on it too it shows 30GB. although i booted unbutu and used Qtparted to see and i saw 1 partition which was 30Gb and other as 50gg. Now i combined both and made them fat32. made all the changes and restarted in winXP pro setup and there it only shows me 30 GB.

Why?/.

[kjaada]

Try a linux live disk like Knoppix.It does seem very strange tho.

[Graham L]

Have a look at the BIOS settings. It looks as if you have an older setting which won't access the rest of the disk. "LBA" required?

[gum digger]

Have a look at the BIOS settings. It looks as if you have an older setting which won't access the rest of the disk. "LBA" required?

Where in bios. i have Asus Cusi-M series.

[Graham L]

I can't give you the exact location, but look at the "IDE" or disks area.

[gum digger]

I dont see anything. this motherboard is about 4.5 years old. i think lba is only for 130gb and above if iam not wrong?.

[snoopy]

XP cannot FORMAT a volume larger than 32 GB in size using their native FAT32 file system.

[Speedy Gonzales]

The LBA option maybe under the primary / secondary IDE options in the BIOS.

Click on whatever IDE connection the hdd/s are on in the BIOS.

Snoopy is right tho. Convert them to NTFS. Any reason why u want them in FAT32?

[pctek]

XP cannot FORMAT a volume larger than 32 GB in size using their native FAT32 file system.

XP can't but an older O/S can. Just use a boot disk the install XP.

The MFT is the heart of an NTFS partition. There is at least one entry in the MFT for every file on an NTFS volume. All the information about a file, including its' size, time and date stamps, permissions, data content, etc. are stored in the MFT (or in space described by the MFT).

To prevent fragmentation of the MFT, NTFS reserves space for the MFT in an effort to keep it as contiguous as it grows. This is important because defraggers can not move MFT records and fragmentation of the MFT can severely impact performance. (Current defraggers do this at boot time)

When you add files to an NTFS volume, entries are added to the MFT. When files are deleted from an NTFS volume, their MFT entries are marked as free and may be reused, but the MFT does not shrink. Thus, space used by these entries is not reclaimed from the disk.

NTFS reserves a percentage of the volume for exclusive use of the MFT. Space for files and directories will not be allocated from this MFT zone until all other space is allocated first. Depending on the average file size and other variables, either the reserved MFT zone or the unreserved space on the disk may be filled first. Volumes with a few large files will exhaust the unreserved space first, while volumes with a large number of small files will exhaust the MFT zone space first. When either the MFT zone or the unreserved space fills, fragmentation of the MFT starts. If the unreserved space becomes full, space for user files and directories will be allocated from the MFT zone. If the MFT zone becomes full, space for new MFT entries will be allocated from the remainder of the disk.

[trig42]

No-one has been playing with the jumpers on that disk have they? There is a Jumper setting to limit the size of a disk to 32Gb. Worth a check.