Preserved Topic: Can anyone help?

I posted this problem on one of the best computing forums i know. So far it has had
"28 views" without a single reply. My kind of challenge.

I have to admit I can't figure this one out. google group search? nada
MS knowledgebase? nope, nothing. web search ---nothing.



without reposting all the gory details, certain folders on my slave drive
report huge differences between "size" and "size on disk". only
certain folders, FAT32, both under 98se and xp..... drive otherwise
functions perfectly and has been scandisked (98) and chkdsk'd (xp)

these folders are copies of folders from the master drive...all the ones
on the master report perfectly.

the only thing i can think of is that the disk is 80Gig....

Well, I really need to hear the gory details in order to give you any sort of help.

Now, I'd normally say run scandisk to rebuild the folder tree so that the sizes reported are accurate, but since you've already done that we'll rule that out.

Another culprit could be your cluster sizes on the master disk as opposed to the cluster size on teh slave disk. Especially since it's such a large disk volume. Also, check to see if your disk compression is on for either of the drives. Now, FAT does do some weird things sometimes, so it's hard to pin down a single culprit.

Other than cluster sizes or disk compression, you could check to see the types of files in the folders. Are they compressed formats like jpg and gif or are they executables?

Could be a lot of things but, like I said, I need more details.

Things such as:
What exact file system do you use on both disks (e.g. FAT32 with 4k clusters)?
What OS are you using?
Does it report the same size difference for both OSes?
What type of disks are they (e.g. Seagate, Fujitsu, etc.)?
BIOS settings for the disks.
And anything else you might think of...

K - you asked

First keep in mind that this is only on a few folders (including their
subfolders) as opposed to all the folders - that rules out lots of possibilities.
the folders do not seem corrupt, they open perfectly and allow file read and write.

- no disk compression
- both FAT32, all drives partitioned and formated thru fdisk (no partition magic crap)
- problem occurs in windows 98 se and windows XP (dual boot)
- exact copy of the folders on master does not report any
discrepancies (this rules out file type or compressed file issues, but there
some of the folders are office docs others are mixed)

Things such as:
What exact file system do you use on both disks (e.g. FAT32 with 4k clusters)?
FAT 32 on both
slave is a western digital eide 80gig 7200 (spanking new)

What OS are you using? dual boot
Does it report the same size difference for both OSes? yes, consistent

What type of disks are they (e.g. Seagate, Fujitsu, etc.)? both wd, one 20, other 80
both 66's and jumpers are set correctly
(again, the incorrect file size is only on the slave, no probs on master)

BIOS settings for the disks. which ones? bios recognizes both drives - i.e. slave versus master and size is reported properly
(note: FDISK did not. i had to get a fdisk from windows ME to partition - this
is a known bug - that was the only problem i had, other than reassigning the
drive names under XP so that they matched those in 98SE)

slave is a single 80Gig extended partition with one logical drive.
in other words this is not your typical system.
both drives have plenty of free space (70 gig free on the slave)

the putr is a rambus driven dell p3 that runs perfectly

Master:
c: 98se bootable
d: data only (ghosting)
e: win xp bootable (boot.ini set to default xp)
g: cdrom
h: burner

Slave:
f: data only (not bootable)

hth and thanks
not too many people run dual boot, particularly with 80 gig slaves.

Sometimes a disk, if you don't format it right can make a 1:2, 1:3 or 1:4 kb ratio. Check the other file on your HD.

Well, one thing I would like to rule out is fragmentation. Since your master disk is heavily partitioned fragmentation can be a problem.

Try defragging both drives and see if that clears up the problem. Also, a reformat might help also.

CF
some of the folders seem to be 1:2
but that was just a fluke in the image i posted

the ratio varies for each of these screwed up
folders.... one is 3:5 for example

as for the format...no errors were reported..what else can i say
what do you mean by check the other file on your HD?

edit:
silence: the drive is 2 weeks old and is only used for data, no apps whatsover
so frag is incredibley unlikely, but i will check it - btw, if it does need to
be defragged after 2 weeks (hardly any writes on this drive) i will uninstall
it and put in the garbage.

reformat: that's out of the question for now.....this drive is not ghosted and it
took me hours to transfer files from cds (all assets such as textures and mp3s)
so that's a last resort i.e all the files are backedup, but i'm in no mood to
transfer 10 gigs of data anywhere until all solutions are exhausted...the other
thing i need to consider is this

does this even matter? is it only cosmetic?
i have no idea. i am using this drive daily and
have not had a hiccup yet...if it goes down....not a real problem
i just want to find a solution.. thanks for your help anyway
and don't feel bad...i have had over 30 views now and not a single reply
from a forum where i consider the guys to be "the experts" on winblows




[This message has been edited by ShootingStar (edited 06-15-2002).]

For the format, try to format it from your disk manager, or whatever the XP equivalent is.

Also, the format command from the command line might work. Hopefully, XP has it.

Try:

format /?

That should give you the options for the command. What you want to look out for is the default allocation size. On the hard drives, there should be information as to the sector size. 4096 bytes should be a good ideal, but with a disk that large you might want to go 128k or 256k for sector sizes over 512 bytes.

I ran scandisks again and noticed
the clusters on the slave were
a mind boggling 32,768. i had not paid attention before.

as expected they were 4096 on the master
except for the xp partition which was at 8192.

Depending on the number and nature of the files, this could, in fact, be correct. Especially since there's a large number of small files.

Disk space is allocated in clusters. Clusters are made of multiple sectors. FAT32 uses 8 sectors per cluster, yeilding a 4K cluster size. This is the smallest amount of space any file can be allocated.

Therefore, a file of even one byte must be allocated a full cluster, "wasting" the other 4095 bytes in the cluster. A 6K file "wastes" 2K, etc. It's that "slack space" that you're seeing. Nearly 3,000 small files makes for quite a bit of slack.

Win98 does not report slack space (as I recall), only the size of the actual data you've stored. WinXP reports both the size of the data in the files, (the first number) and the the total size of all the clusters consumed (the second number) in order to store those data.

XP isn't confused or using more disk space, it's simply reporting more of the facts that 98 hides from you.

<edit> Ooops. Didn't see that last post. So XP is using larger clusters and generating more slack space. Reformatting that partition and specifying the smallest cluster size (fewest sectors per cluster) will help you gain some of it back. </edit>

"the most incredible feats are often accomplished by
those who have had the most incredible challenges"

[This message has been edited by brucew (edited 06-15-2002).]

Yeah, I thought it would most likely be a cluster problem. However, I don't know if you should go all the way down to 4096 byte clusters since it is such a large volume. 128k clusters should be fine and should get you back at least 80% or more of the disk space on that drive.

If you're really set on squeezing as much space as possible out of the drive, then go with 4096 byte cluster sizes, but that could slow down access time, and with a large size disk, that might be noticeable.

Glad we could help.

ok, were making progress.

note: this is not an OS issue. both my windows xp and my windows 98se
identify the same differences between "size" and "size on disk".
Similarly, there is no OS installed on this drive, just data (the partition is not
bootable) - so again, no relationship to the OS that i can see.

what is the optimal file size for an 80gig extended partition. i can't find
any documentation, even on the WDC site??

another thing i checked, and brucew you hit the nail on the head, the folders
in questions are all text or html while the folders that are fine are spreadsheets
and mp3s (i.e the small files are causing the problems as would be expected
with screwed up cluster sizes). i guess you can do the math by dividing
the number of files by the folder size

which brings me back to think of some problems i had when i installed the drive.
not only did fdisk not recognize the drive (that's why i used fdisk from ME)
but i also was not able to use FORMAT from dos (bootable diskette).

I know there was a bug with format as well (can't recognize larger than 64gig) but
that bug was purely cosmetic...it would recognize 80gig when completed, or so i read.

i couldn't get past the format form dos, so consequently i had to format from windows xp...which i didn't want to do given all the
crap services and firewall and norton av running in the background!

i guess i'm going to have to reformat..shit..after all. but i don't understand
why i can't reformat from a diskette.....(p.s. i have used the same diskette
about once every 12-18 months to reformat and reghost my drives....so it does work!)

thanks guys
i'll let you know how it goes.....i'm going to move the 10 gig from the slave
selectively to different partitions on the master...god what a pain in the ass
this will be.....well this was my first large drive installation and this is what
you call learning the f******* hard way....and yes, i did RTFM!
on the other hand, i might just tolerate the slack for a while....when i
start doing some video editing i'll need the full 80 gig, but right now
i'm just using 10 and i have plenty left on the master as well.

lol

thanks again and have a great weekend.


[This message has been edited by ShootingStar (edited 06-15-2002).]

Okay, the biggest problem is that DOS is a 16-bit operating system and if you do the math (2^16), it can normally only recognize 65536 addresses. Windows, a 32-bit operating system can recognize only about 4 Gigs, an old size limit. Now, they've increased this in several ways (the details best left to history), but the bad news is that the old format and fdisk programs aren't able to assign the addresses for that big of a drive. It's not a bug, just a limitation of software that didn't advance as fast as hardware. That's why you can't format from disk. You can read from the disk after it's been formattted since the file structure is already written, but the DOS bootable OS won't be able to create the partition.

So, you have to run the format from XP. XP should be able to handle large disk sizes, and the format should go fine, if rather slow. Just make sure you format it as FAT32. Win98 can't even read NTFS partitions. And pick a decent cluster size.

Good luck.

Silence:
Actually, that's not the case. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q263044

quote:

---

When you use Format.com to format a partition or logical drive that is larger than 64 gigabytes (64 GB, or 68,719,476,736 bytes) in size, Format.com does not report the correct size of the drive being formatted at the beginning of the format process. However, as the formatting process progresses, the entire drive is formatted, and the correct formatted size is displayed when the operation is finished.
CAUSE
Format.com uses some 16-bit values internally to calculate the initial displayed size of the drive. Some of these variables overflow when the drive size is equal to or larger than 64 GB.
RESOLUTION
This is a display (or cosmetic) issue only; the drive is formatted to its full size.

---

so while your 16 bit reasoning was correct, format.com should work.
still have not figured out why it didn't in my case, but i'll have to
try again to find out.

Interesting stuff there, SS. Thanks for the update. I was working from the original Win98SE versions of FDISK so I didn't know they'd gotten around the limit thing.

As for not working on your particular drive, *shrug*, the best I can say is that the utils you're using were never meant for that kind of large volume. Then again, working that close to the machine level, expect all sorts of weird things to happen.

Anyway, hope things work out for you. Wish I had a 80 GB drive. ~sigh~

ShootingStar, even if you reformat your drive you'll still end up with the same "problem". The thing is that you can't choose cluster size under FAT32 file system. It is *automatically* chosen when formatting according to the following chart:

512 - 8,191 MB = 4 KB cluster size
8,192 - 16,383 MB = 8 KB cluster size
16,384 - 32,767 MB = 16 KB cluster size
32,768 MB - 2000 GB = 32 KB cluster size

So, you'll still have 32KB clusters on you drive and a lot of wasted space in folder with small files (i.e. like your "Webs" folder with almost 3000 files and average size of 19KB, which leaves you with 13KB of wasted space per file). There is a reason for this, but I don't have time to explain it (if you want to read more about this visit this page).

Now, what are your options here...

1. If you want to stick with FAT32 and have less wasted space, you'll have to divide that drive to smaller partitions (according to the chart from above).

2. Switch over to NTFS file system which comes with Windows NT/2K/XP. Maximum cluster size under NTFS is 4KB regardless of partition size. Only drawback is that you won't be able to read this parition from Windows 98...

Thanks Max. That's exactly what i need to research.
I did not know of any switch to allocate cluster size
which makes sense, since from your post it does not
exist.

NTFS is not a viable option because i am using 2 OS's
and 2 computers (fast ethernet lan, the other putr being 98SE only). Both
PCs and both OS's must read each others partitions. plus i still want
full control over DOS including my version of Ghost which will work with
XP but not with NTFS...ghost is the most important piece of software i own.

- adding partitions is not an option i want to consider at this
point because i will need all the space if i want to video-edit
home movies - that's the reason behind this new 80GIG

- what i could do is repartition the master to remove space
from the XP partition and allocate it to the data partition on
the master (cluster=4096) and then store smaller files on
that drive.

all my applications that are shared by XP and 98SE
are installed on exactly the same partition so as not to waste space.

- also, this is good reason to move smaller assets such as
compressed graphics files on to CD libraries instead of on the HDD.
(the larger assets such as MP3s do not waste space)

thanks to everyone for their input, let's keep the thread open
so i can post any new findings or lessons learned

Just one small info regarding network. Other computers can access NTFS partitions through network no matter what version of Windows they run...

Win98 can read NTFS Drives.....
BUT:
You have to pay for it ($49). Are You willing to do so?
then look at http://www.winternals.com/products/fct/ntfswin98.asp. Maybe there are more programs who can do this trick. Try a good search on it.

There is some question floating thru my mind? For what reason do you want to stick to win98? I know there are lots
of reasons for using win98 but what is yours?


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<edit-on>drrreaded typo's<edit-off>

[This message has been edited by Rinswind 2th (edited 06-18-2002).]