partition magic problems/ wrong drive space reported

[S.D.Willie]

hey,

strange scenario. i have two hard disks in my PC in XP pro.. a 40gig and an 80 gig. i wanted to do a backup of most of everything from C to D. in order to have a file larger than 4 gigs i would need my D drive to be ntfs(according to windows). no big deal, ive done it plenty of times.

i converted my 80 gig drive from fat32 to ntfs and ran my backup. well, backup was too big, i ran outta space after realizing it was almost 40 gigs of a backup!!! anyhow, i deleted the backup it couldnt finish but now i cant seem to get all my free space back. it only says i have about 500 megs free on my D drive.

here's the funny part. i go back to change the d drive to fat 32, partition magic reboots, i see when it does it, it says it created it successfully and it reboots as usual. wouldnt you know it it will NOT convert back to fat32 at all.

at this point i dont mind leaving my drive NTFS but how could it not be showing the proper space anymore? sorry i rambled.

[sechs]

PM probably foobarred the file system. Try reformating the partition in Windows. If that fails, you can repartition the drive in the disk manager and start over.

[S.D.Willie]

problem is i was trying to avoid formatting because all of the data i have on that particular drive and to transfer it to cd would be a bitch. well, i might just try dumping the files on a newly aquired external tape drive i guess. seems im S.O.L.

[sechs]

Lesson learned

[S.D.Willie]

Lesson learned

cool. now tell me what lesson that was? not to use partition magic? lucky i had enough space to store on a few other machines. thanks god for networking.

[sechs]

1. Backup
2. The easy path always has higher risk.