Help with HDD capacity reduction mystery

My daughters Compaq Win XP SP3 desk top PC would not boot up yesterday
and she has Acronis TI 11, so we used the Acronis bootup CD to start
the PC. Our next effort was to run Acronis restore to copy the past
full image backup of 112 GB stored on an external HDD.

What was perplexing was the restore application showed that we were
attempting to restore 112 GB from the external HDD to only 30 GB
capacity on drive C of the internal destination HDD. When she last
looked at her internal HDD in MY Computer it had revealed that there
was 155 GB of total capacity and 123 used. Now when she looks at
properties in My Computer she sees 30 GB of used HDD space and 5
unused?

Would any one have thoughts on what would or could have caused the
internal HDD to lose all that capacity? It apparently is not being
used by any runaway application as she has looked at several different
HDD usage freeware applications and there is nothing suspicious.

Could malware eat the HDD or is this a sigh of a failing HDD?

Mary

On 11/21/2011 01:38 PM, ECLiPSE 2002 wrote:
My daughters Compaq Win XP SP3 desk top PC would not boot up yesterday
and she has Acronis TI 11, so we used the Acronis bootup CD to start
the PC. Our next effort was to run Acronis restore to copy the past
full image backup of 112 GB stored on an external HDD.

What was perplexing was the restore application showed that we were
attempting to restore 112 GB from the external HDD to only 30 GB
capacity on drive C of the internal destination HDD. When she last
looked at her internal HDD in MY Computer it had revealed that there
was 155 GB of total capacity and 123 used. Now when she looks at
properties in My Computer she sees 30 GB of used HDD space and 5
unused?

Would any one have thoughts on what would or could have caused the
internal HDD to lose all that capacity? It apparently is not being
used by any runaway application as she has looked at several different
HDD usage freeware applications and there is nothing suspicious.

Could malware eat the HDD or is this a sigh of a failing HDD?

Mary


Have a look in the bios to see how the drive is recognized...
normally "auto" is the best way to go...
I wonder if the bios settingd got changed and it was set manually to
32gigs

Thanks for the response philo - she discovered what happened. Somehow
during the restore process her drive C was partitioned in two drives -
a C and a C secure. Inexplicably the restore process placed 80% of her
C drive into the secure C drive.She was able to transfer it back to
the normal C drive.

Mary



On Tue, 22 Nov 2011 07:49:26 -0600, philo wrote:

On 11/21/2011 01:38 PM, ECLiPSE 2002 wrote:
My daughters Compaq Win XP SP3 desk top PC would not boot up yesterday
and she has Acronis TI 11, so we used the Acronis bootup CD to start
the PC. Our next effort was to run Acronis restore to copy the past
full image backup of 112 GB stored on an external HDD.

What was perplexing was the restore application showed that we were
attempting to restore 112 GB from the external HDD to only 30 GB
capacity on drive C of the internal destination HDD. When she last
looked at her internal HDD in MY Computer it had revealed that there
was 155 GB of total capacity and 123 used. Now when she looks at
properties in My Computer she sees 30 GB of used HDD space and 5
unused?

Would any one have thoughts on what would or could have caused the
internal HDD to lose all that capacity? It apparently is not being
used by any runaway application as she has looked at several different
HDD usage freeware applications and there is nothing suspicious.

Could malware eat the HDD or is this a sigh of a failing HDD?

Mary


Have a look in the bios to see how the drive is recognized...
normally "auto" is the best way to go...
I wonder if the bios settingd got changed and it was set manually to
32gigs

On 11/22/2011 08:35 AM, ECLiPSE 2002 wrote:


Thanks for the response philo - she discovered what happened. Somehow
during the restore process her drive C was partitioned in two drives -
a C and a C secure. Inexplicably the restore process placed 80% of her
C drive into the secure C drive.She was able to transfer it back to
the normal C drive.

Mary



Glad you got it sorted out!