Missing space on Vertex 2 120

[seadog]

I have just installed my system as below. I loaded the OS onto the SSD and then noticed that despite the fact that ASUS specifically say that the sata2 and 3 ports are ahci, I found that the bios had them as ide.I changed this with some trepidation and wow my data WEI went from 6.5 to 7.5. Great.
Then I started having some probs including BSODS and the ASUS bluetooth installer went crazy and killed half my USB ports.

I decided to reinstall windows and found that I had a small partition that I could not use and the available partition was down to 110GB. Surprising as I thought that W7 install did a quick format. So I decided to set up on OS on an HDD and use the SDD as a slave. I thought I would be able to clean the data off the drive in this way. Surely if it was page files etc I should be able to find and delete them with the disk in secondary mode?

First I upgraded the firmware - no probs but I could not find my missing blocks. After deleting all I could, all that was on the disk was a blank partition of 100GB. None of the disk analysers like windirstat could find any more. I then tried some of the HDD clean routines but was unable to make any of them work. I tried to make a bootable flash drive but without success - mine are all bigger than 4GB which ruled out most of the options. My brand new W7SP1 does not have HDPARM anywhere I can find it.

Can anyone help. Where has the space gone. Is it recoverable? Where is HDPARM. Why does such a basic problem not have a OS based clean up sanitize routine. Surely this is not too much to ask?

No I have not run any benchmarks or other stuff. BSODS were caused by overclocking not the OS it turns out.

Frustrated to hell.


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i7 2600k W7 8gb Mushkins Corsair 850W ASUS p8p67 pro, ASUS gtx460

 

[Surveyor]

Have you updated with the correct firmware?

I'm not sure if you'd be able to use the wrong one but there's a 100GB version of that drive.

Your PC will see the capacity as around 111.75 gigabytes.

PC's use the gigabyte which is 1,073,741,824 bytes and disk manufacturers use the gibibyte which is 1,000,000,000 bytes.

 

[DragonQ]

You should see a ~107 GiB (25 nm NAND) or ~112 GiB (34 nm NAND) as the total drive size. When you install Windows it'll usually add a ~100 MiB partition at the beginning of the drive for boot files - this is normal and fine.

Do a secure erase with the OCZ Toolbox to bring the drive back to a fresh state, then reinstall Windows to the raw drive space.