Incorrect Free Space

[Alipour]

I have a 160gb hard drive and i know that i have about 115gb free on it but in explorer on XP and in the disk manager, it says that i only have 2gb free space. these problems come after i messed around with the partitions to install vista, but to no avail. anyone know how i can get it to see the free space correctly?

 

[Freestone]

What does "messed around with the partitions" mean? What does Disk Management show for partition(s)?

 

[Alipour]

i installed a program called 'os selector' that would create a new partition and allow me to boot ither XP or vista, but after it supposedly created a new parition, my computer failed to boot correctly. after much effort, i got it to boot in safe mode and i brought it back to a restore point i hade made. after that, everything seemed fine expcept that explorer now said i only had 2gb of free space remaining which i knew wasnt true. disk managment shows that i have 2 paritions, one that is 153gb and is 1% free and the other is 15.7mb for OS selector.

 

[Freestone]

You should back up any data you consider valuable now to another device as who knows what has happened to your drive's partitioning and/or file structure. It does sound ominous when a partition is supposed to be created, but doesn't appear in Disk Management, and suddenly you're missing 100 or so gigs of free space.

Once you feel you have you data secured, trying opening a command prompt and running chkdsk. See if reports any errors.

At the time the restore point was created, you did have the 100 or so gig free, right?

 

[Alipour]

yes, at the restore point all was well. i did run chkdsk and it locks up on the last stage where it says 'checking free space' or something like that.
when i run defrag, the graphic representation shows that i have alot of free space remaining on the disk, yet it still says i only have 1% free.