I am running win XP Pro on a 1Ghtz AMD Athalon with 640 MB of SDRAM. This problem started when I cut and pasted some rather large files from my F Drive to my C Drive. Now the space went down appropriately on the C Drive but on the F Drive the space didn't go up. It should have 5 gig available but it only shows 2.24 gig available in My Computer. Why won't it show the correct HD space.

Go into help, type "losing disk space", once you have the results, click on the Microsoft Knowledge Base button, there is an entry called "Windows Xp does not recognise all available disk space", go read it, I would have pasted it, but it's huge.................

The solution that the knowlege base gives you seems to be referring as to never having the disk space available to you at all, instead of just losing it somehow in a cut and paste. And it seems the only way to fix this is it wants to you to format and erase everything, there's got to be a way without deleting everything. I hope.

If you read it more closely, it tells you how to identify clusters that have been sized incorrectly by Xp, which is what has happened to you. It also tells you how to format the individual clusters that you have identified as being incorrectly sized, WITHOUT formatting anything else.

The one about the cluster stuff is listed under "How to Locate and Correct Disk Space Problems on NTFS Volumes in Windows XP" not under the "does not recognize disk space" besides that the "size" and "size on disk" readouts are alomst exactly the same in which which the knowledge base refers to this difference as being the wasted space on the disk. When I select all files in the F Drive it reads 32.2 GB and when u click once on the drive in my comp it says 37.2 GB total space and 2.24 available, not sure if I mentioned the specific problem I was having