Disc Space Disappearing After Windows Installation

[nolan.k.mitchel]

Greetings,

Sorry to be a bother, but I've recently had some problems when trying to install Windows XP on my MacBook Pro using Bootcamp. I've done some things to fix problems with the installation and have managed to get XP on my computer but its still not correct. Here are some problems that I have encountered:

1. When running Bootcamp Assistant from Leopard I get a kernal panic during the partitioning process and have to restart my computer. When I boot up again I noticed I lost all of the disc space that I had used to make the new Windows partition. I fixed this by booting up from my Leopard disc and using the disc utility to repair the HD which gave me back the lost space. I got around this problem by partitioning my HD in disc utility booting from the Leopard disc.

2. I have Windows XP installed on my Mac now and it runs fine, except that I partitioned it to have 40gb of space but it tells me that only 16.5 are available. It states 16.5gb is left of 40gb so I know that the partition is indeed 40gb. Where or how is more than 20gb of space already used up when all I have done is installed Windows XP? I formated the partition as NTFS.

Sorry for the long post, I tried to explain as much as I could. I'm hoping for a quick response I've got Age of Conan ready to install . Thanks again.

Cheers.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

20 GB is very high for XP. What version of XP is it, and what other applications do you have installed? Finally, you may want to (at least for diagnostic reasons,) disable both System Restore and Virtual Memory.

 

[nolan.k.mitchel]

It's just a regular Windows XP Home Edition. I know its taking way too much room for just having Windows installed on the partition. I don't have any applications added yet, so there is something wrong. I'm going to try just installing Age of Conan which needs 32gb of room to see if maybe there is just a problem with how much room is available being displayed.

 

[pegasoar]

It's just a regular Windows XP Home Edition. I know its taking way too much room for just having Windows installed on the partition. I don't have any applications added yet, so there is something wrong. I'm going to try just installing Age of Conan which needs 32gb of room to see if maybe there is just a problem with how much room is available being displayed.

Hi, similar problem occurred to me. A disk occupation of 32 GB is reported, by when adding up all the space used by the directories I only get 15 GB. So, where are the missing 17 GB? Hope anyone can help. Thanks in advance. Achille

 

[RHD]

I partitioned my XP at about 70gigs because I need to run high end 3D apps but now I think about it it was XP Pro rather than home.
Seems fine anyway.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

I will mention that I experienced the same issue you started with. Trying to run Boot Camp assistant, and it kernel panicked on me, with a bunch of space suddenly gone from my hard drive. Booting the Leopard disc, repairing the disk made it come back. But every time I run the Boot Camp assistant, it does it again. I haven't tried just repartitioning while booted from the Leopard disc.

One thing that you probably won't want to try, but you never know...

From the Mac OS, reformat your Windows partition to "Mac OS Extended", and see if it is full size there. Maybe copy a few large files (disk image the Leopard DVD a few times,) onto it, make sure you can use the full 40 GB.

If you can use the full 40, then go ahead and reformat it "MS-DOS (FAT) from within the Mac OS, make sure you can use it all, then finally erase it again and try installing Windows again.

 

[tgl]

I had a similar problem recently on my macbook.
First to fix (repair) the problem with disapering space I booted into single user mode and ran the following command:

/sbin/fsck -fy

You can see what this will do by running 'man fsck' before you ran the above command.

After this completed (took a while) the corruption that occured during previous bootcamp crash was repaired and disc space was reclaimed.
Then I defragged the disk (used DriveGenius 2 for this by booting from it's disk and defragging my mac partition).
After all this bootcamp worked properly and had no problem partitioning and later installing Vista 32 Home Premium (on my one year old black macbook).

All of the above info I found by googling around.