I'm having some-what of a problem when installing a clean version of xp. Every time I do so I get less and less hard drive physical space that I can use. I have a 20GB maxtor hard drive that originaly had win 98se on it formated in Fat32. I then did a clean install of win 2kpro and decided to use NTFS due to the security and the reliability of the format. About a year ago I upgraded to win xp. Then a few months ago while doing my anual PC clean before I go back to school. I did a clean install of xp on the hard drive. I went from 19gb witch isn't bad considering I formated in NTFS to a low 16.5gb. Ok!!!!!!!! my first responce was where the hell is the 2.5gb go. I tried doing a couple things. Did another clean installation of xp lost another 2.5gb. What was a nice 19gb space is now as low as 14gb physical hard drive space. I don't want to go and write 0's to the drive (Bad Past Experiance). I booted up to a 98se floppy disk and deleted the partition but did not creat a new one due to the fact the fat32 does not support hard drives bigger then 15gb. A few weeks ago I basicly quit tring but, I am doing this as a last ditch messure to see if anyone has any advise, any tools or anything that may alow me to recover the 5gb I lost. I have partition magic but don't know much about it will it work??? Thanks Peter

Sounds like your disappearing space is just becoming un allocated to a partition. Partition magic should be able to fix that. just run it and then select resize partition and resize it so it fills all the unallocated space. Or else you can try Fdisk. and just delet ALL the partitions and start over from scratch. Hope it helps Ryan