Free sata disk space not being acknowledged

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Here's a new one for you guys. I have three sata hard drives in my primary computer. WinXp acknowledges all three. All three drives have the appropriate "total" hard disk space posted in explorer (and everywhere else for that matter). The problem is the free space. I can have, for instance, 100 gigs of free space on a drive or partition. I can create/copy a 30-gig file on to that drive or partition, delete it and explorer will show only 70-gig free disk space. Copying or creating files on to that drive or partition will continue to consume the space until space runs out. Deleting files doesn’t make a difference. I cannot recover the free disk space unless I reformat the drive or partition. I have tried performing a clean install of XP, updating the motherboard bios and updating motherboard drivers. None of which have worked so far. Any insight as to what is going on? Unless I can pinpoint the problem, I have resigned myself to the fact that a new motherboard may be the only solution. Thanks in advance for the help.
 
Do you have Norton System Works or similar utility? If you have Norton Protected Recycle Bin, it needs to be emptied as well.
 
I appreciate the help and thank goodness I’m persistent. A few weeks back I had heard that during boot-up I could press F6 to load separate drivers for raid or hard disk controllers. F6 was not even acknowledged at boot-up. Later I found out that the procedure was ultimately incorrect. I discovered that during installation of WinXP it will ask at that time whether or not you would like to load separate drivers for raid or hard disk controllers. Pressing F6 will tell Xp to look for controller drivers in the floppy drive. Since I love to reinstall Windows over and over, I gave it another try. Sure enough the F6 instruction popped up and I proceeded to load controller drivers from the floppy. When it was all said and done, the hard disks performed and registered normally. Thanks for any and all input. Problem solved.
 
I see. When you said you did a clean install and updated the motherboard drivers, I incorrectly assumed that the SATA/RAID drivers were part of that.
 
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