hi,

I'm new here, and I 've been reading around posts about the 137G barrierfor a couple of days, and maybe the solution of my problem is somewhere in this forum, but I did not find it.

I downloaded the modified esdi_506.pdr (20/07/2006 version) , partioned a big HD (sold as "300GO") with freefdisk (well, i'm not sure the version of fdisk i used ), so I could have several big parttions.

Before using this HD, my partitions (controlled by LetterAssign) were C: and F: on the fist HD, so that i could add 2 HD with their first partitions taking the letters D:and E: without changing the paths to my data (G: is affected by defaut to my DVD-burner, but I don't mind it changing letter in case of new HD)

My mobo is recent enough to manage big HDs (48 bits LBA capable).

My big HD has 4 fat32 parittions:

- first, 7,6GO , "could be" boot partition (selecting the boot drive by bios), seen as D:

- second partition : 149 GO , seen as E:

- third partition : 114 GO , seen as G:

- last partition: the rest of the available size : 7,6 GO , seen as H:

To test, I had to " stuff" the big partitions and see if my data would be corrupted.

Si I used CDCheck to compute a file (drive_F.CRC) from **all_the_data** on my F: partition (~30GO used), and stuffed my E: partition with 4 copies of the content of F: , 4 folders named Copie_F_1 to Copie_F_4, and then I checked the contents using drive_F.CRC.

The result of the check is "no error" for the 4 folders, and the total size of the 4 folders is well detected by windows as 117GO :

The same way, one copy of F: has been made to G:., first "directly", and later to a folder "copy_F".

Checking by CDCheck and crc file was OK, and the size reported by windows was right for the folder:

Though, if I ask windows the used/free size in the partitions, they are wrong :

Partition G: is strange

Is there a solution to this problem ? I have not used other bits of the "unofficial 98SE service pack" yet, only esdi_506.pdr.

did I miss something ?

Is this not a generic Windows problem that makes that the ratio used/empty is often misreported on the drive property sheets ?

I have got this problem often as well and the way to fix it (temporarily) is to run scandisk or defrag (or one of their clones) on the drives.

I think this problem predates the installation of moded esdi_506.pdr on my machine and that it is related to how free space is calculated on FAT32.

Some babble from wikipedia :

In fact, computing free disk space on FAT is one of the most resource intensive operations, as it requires reading the entire FAT linearly. A possible justification suggested by Microsoft's Raymond Chen for limiting the maximum size of FAT32 partitions created on Windows was the time required to perform a simple "DIR" operation, which always displays the free disk space as the last line.[9] Displaying this line took longer and longer as the number of clusters increased.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table

When you look at a drive property sheet, you can see that the FAT is not scanned for making a calculation of free space.

Certainly there is a place where this free space value is stored, and incremented after each relevant operation (occupy or free clusters) but this incrementation suffers from a bug apparently.

And the problem is not new as you can see in this thread on annoyances.org :

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/win2000/t1005768629

I think there is nothing to worry about.

Edited September 15, 200718 yr by eidenk