Since formatting, HD only has half the number of clusters and sectors

[tbhandari]

I'm running Win ME (please, no laughs) and windows crashed. I reformatted, and started all over. The weird thing is that now when I run scandisk, it reports only half the number of sectors and clusters as opposed to before the crash. I'm not sure why it's doing this. I'm still reading the hard drive to be the same size, but now instead of it being broken up into around 57000 sectors, I have about 28000 sectors. The same goes for clusters too. Before the crash, scandisk was reading roughly 3.6 million clusters, but now it's only like 1.8 million clusters.

Any thoughts onto why this is happening?

Thanks in advance!

-tan

 

[mainegeek]

tbhandari,
Is there more than 1 partition on the drive?

 

[tbhandari]

Nope. Just 1 partition.

 

[micker377]

When you re-formatted, did you also use "FDisk? What did you use to format? Part of the "do-over" process, did you see and allow "Large"?

 

[tbhandari]

Yup. I did a standard "fdisk" (no additional switches). Chose large. Did a standard "format c:". Booted to the cd-rom and did a basic install of Win ME. It's weird cuz everything works fine. The hd is still read as being the same size prior to the crash. But the number of sectors and clusters listed on the disk are half of what they used to be prior to the crash.

Could that be part of the problem? Like maybe it was incorrectly reading the hd prior to the crash, and that the values that I'm seeing now are the real accurate ones?

 

[micker377]

Did you format as Fat32, or NTFS? Do you know what it was before? NTFS and Fat32 have different size clusters. If the final disk size is the same, don't worry. The only possible problem is that DOS based programs can't read NTFS files.

 

[tbhandari]

It was Fat32 before as well as now. I'm not worried (at least I don't know if I should be) about it being an issue. It's more for personal knowledge, just trying to figure out why it's happening.

 

[edfair]

Have run across it previously under SE where the floppy based fdisk and format have installed one size and the CD based setup accepted the full size.

Seems there was a MS patch at some point to resolve similar issues.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[tbhandari]

Did you see any problems? Decreased speed? Wasted space? Wasted memory?