Harddrive space recognition problems.

[SlaPPiE]

Hello,

I was previously using a 60GB 5400RPM Maxtor HD as my slave drive, putting things on it like mp3s, backups, etc. Anyways, all the sudden Windows told me that the data on it was corrupt, and it could not be read. Taking it as not THAT great of loss, I just told Windows to format the drive. Well, it did, but instead of the 57.x amount of gigs it was detecting before, now it's only seeing 31.5 gigs there. I low-level formatted the drive with Maxtor's utilities, but to no avail. Disk Manager is seeing the whole disk as only being that 31.5 gigs. Any idea as to what may have happened, and any way to restore this hard drive?

Thanks for your time, and especially for your help.

 

[dave holbon]

Originally posted by SlaPPiE
Hello,

I was previously using a 60GB 5400RPM Maxtor HD as my slave drive, putting things on it like mp3s, backups, etc. Anyways, all the sudden Windows told me that the data on it was corrupt, and it could not be read. Taking it as not THAT great of loss, I just told Windows to format the drive. Well, it did, but instead of the 57.x amount of gigs it was detecting before, now it's only seeing 31.5 gigs there. I low-level formatted the drive with Maxtor's utilities, but to no avail. Disk Manager is seeing the whole disk as only being that 31.5 gigs. Any idea as to what may have happened, and any way to restore this hard drive?

Thanks for your time, and especially for your help.

What file system did windows format the drive to?

Have you checked the drive jumpers?

Disk Manager?

Fire-up the latest version of Partition Magic. If your using XP make sure you use the NTFS file system.

 

[SlaPPiE]

Yeah, sorry, I guess I wasn't too specific.

I had it format it to NTFS, yes, the drive jumpers are correct, and Disk Management (sorry, didn't type it right) is a Windows utility located under Computer Management (Right-click My Computer > Manage).

I've already checked with PartitionMagic, also. It's showing the entire drive only having that 31.5 gigs of space.

 

[NetRyder]

Hmmm ... 32 GB is the FAT32 limit. This shouldn't be happening with NTFS.

 

[dave holbon]

Is the drive still being used as a slave? what is the Maxtor model number? and was any form of operating system related compression in use at the time of the error messages?

 

[dave holbon]

NetRyder:

The 32Mbit limit in an XP imposed limit. Windows 98 can format the FAT32 bit file system to greater than the size of his drive

 

[SlaPPiE]

Yes, the drive is still in there as a slave, as it is operational, but only that limited amount of space is being seen. I'm not putting anything valuable on there, as I don't trust it. This error happened over a month ago, but I am just getting around to confronting this thing. The drive's out of warrenty, so if it's junk, oh well, but I would like to make an attempt to save this thing.

It's a Maxtor 96147U8. And no, there was no drive compression enabked at the time. It was the weirdest thing. All the sudden I couldn't access the drive and XP told me that the drive contained corrupt data.

 

[dave holbon]

This drive has been issued with this warning: -

NOTE: NEVER enter more than 16,383 cylinders in the system BIOS. This may potentially cause data loss. Reference Document Number 63001 for hard drive capacity issues:
Click here for information regarding Binary and Decimal calculations.
Go to here to check your drive settings: -

www.maxtor.com/products/DiamondMax/DiamondMax/QuickSpecs/42072.txt


Hope this helps.