Does this mean my drive is about to fail?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Phil Hadley
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Phil Hadley

One of the drives in my PC is a Seagate ST3200822AS, a 200GB SATA.
It's actually the boot drive. I haven't had any problems or heard any
noises, but today I had occasion to fire up the Control
Panel/AdminTools/Computer Mgmt/Disk Management panel in Windows XP,
and it claimed that the disk capacity was actually 244.68 GB, with
47.41GB of free space, and another 10.96GB unallocated. This was an
OEM disk I installed myself a couple of years ago, so there are no
disk management programs on it. Also, although I don't use the Disk
Management panel often, I have used it at least twice to install newer
drives, and I'm pretty sure I would have noticed all that free space
on my boot drive before. I could admit the possibility that I saved
50GB for Linux for something and then forgot about it, except that I
strongly doubt that Seagate would give me 50 free GB.

One thing that might be relevant is that a year or so ago, I used a
partition management program to split a logical disk on the drive into
smaller pieces. Can Windows be fooled by that kind of thing?

Does this spurious reading indicate that the drive is getting flaky?
I haven't exactly been diligent with backups, so I guess I'll get
started anyway. Thanks for any help.
 
Phil Hadley said:
One of the drives in my PC is a Seagate ST3200822AS, a 200GB
SATA. It's actually the boot drive. I haven't had any problems or
heard any noises, but today I had occasion to fire up the Control
Panel/AdminTools/Computer Mgmt/Disk Management panel in Windows
XP, and it claimed that the disk capacity was actually 244.68 GB,
with 47.41GB of free space, and another 10.96GB unallocated.
Click to expand...

Yeah, something is clearly screwed there somewhere.
This was an OEM disk I installed myself a couple of years
ago, so there are no disk management programs on it.
Also, although I don't use the Disk Management panel
often, I have used it at least twice to install newer drives,
and I'm pretty sure I would have noticed all that free space
on my boot drive before. I could admit the possibility that I
saved 50GB for Linux for something and then forgot about it,
except that I strongly doubt that Seagate would give me 50 free GB.
Click to expand...

Yeah, thats not going to happen unless its not actually
a ST3200822AS but is a 250G drive instead. See what
Everest says the drive is,
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4181
One thing that might be relevant is that a year or so ago, I used a
partition management program to split a logical disk on the drive
into smaller pieces. Can Windows be fooled by that kind of thing?
Click to expand...

Very likely its got the partition table stuffed up.
 
Previously Phil Hadley said:
One of the drives in my PC is a Seagate ST3200822AS, a 200GB SATA.
It's actually the boot drive. I haven't had any problems or heard any
noises, but today I had occasion to fire up the Control
Panel/AdminTools/Computer Mgmt/Disk Management panel in Windows XP,
and it claimed that the disk capacity was actually 244.68 GB, with
47.41GB of free space, and another 10.96GB unallocated. This was an
OEM disk I installed myself a couple of years ago, so there are no
disk management programs on it. Also, although I don't use the Disk
Management panel often, I have used it at least twice to install newer
drives, and I'm pretty sure I would have noticed all that free space
on my boot drive before. I could admit the possibility that I saved
50GB for Linux for something and then forgot about it, except that I
strongly doubt that Seagate would give me 50 free GB.
Click to expand...
One thing that might be relevant is that a year or so ago, I used a
partition management program to split a logical disk on the drive into
smaller pieces. Can Windows be fooled by that kind of thing?
Click to expand...
Does this spurious reading indicate that the drive is getting flaky?
I haven't exactly been diligent with backups, so I guess I'll get
started anyway. Thanks for any help.
Click to expand...

This sounds like a pure software issue, i.e. the drive is fine.
Your data could be in real danger though. Usually disks showing
up larger than they are is due to overlapping partitions. These
can loose data at any time.

Arno
 
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