"Lobster" wrote in message
...
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?

As an aside, I visited some !"£$%£" torrent site which totally screwed my
machine. Wouldn't boot, only got as far as 'no bootable cd' (or whatever it
said). Had to delete the C partition, re-create it, format it (super fdisk),
and ghost an image back to it. 15 mins of sheer annoyance, *******s.