108GB taken up???

[Calibretto]

Ok well my friend bought a Maxtor 250GB refurbished hard drive. He installed XP and then went to look at how much space was being taken up. It says 108GB are taken up!! He scanned for errors and did a defrag but no luck. Is there a way to fix this besides the fact that it's refurbished?

 

[brinks]

Maybe there is old junk on it, did you format the whole drive?

 

[Calibretto]

I doubt there was old junk on it. There wasn't even an OS on it to begin with. And no he didn't format it.

 

[brinks]

Is the drive partitioned?
Try checking different directories to see what is taking up the space.
Also, the drive could have been a storage drive before thus not needing an OS on it.

 

[RicoDirenzo]

If there is more than one partition, it still would not show 108 gigs of usage on the partition he was viewing. Since he did not format the drive, it may have addtional info from a previous install. Download MAxBlast utilites from the web and use that utility to make sure the entire drive is designated for use on XP. It sounds to me like the dirve is only being read at the 137 gig limit.