My (very) old Dell (Windows XP Home) has been getting progressively more slow and unwieldy, and I decided to try and wring a bit more life out of it by reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling Windows - haven't done it for at least 3 years and it normally helps a lot.
I upgraded the HD last time in fact, to a 250Gb one, which I partitioned with a 20Gb drive C (which carried just the O/S) and the rest as drive D (for data). There was a small drive E which IIRC mopped up a few spare Gb left over. For the reformat, I decided to put the whole lot as a single partition (especially as drive C was chock-a-block, thanks to all the MS patches over the years).
I stuck in my Windows set up disk, deleted the existing partitions, and formatted it (NTFCS). However, I was left with only 135 Gb (=127 Gb formatted). ??? What's going on?
My first thought was that the HD is in a poor state, and about 50% of it has been flagged as knackered and unformattable. Is that likely? But the thing is, although the HD was pretty noisy, I never got data errors, and had about 160 Gb of data on it, so that doesn't make sense ( - does it?)
How can I check what's going on?
Thanks David