I have a DB ABC, 160 gb.
I dropped 10 big tables. from SQL2000 view taskpad, can see that the <used> is 88 GB, <free> is 72 gb.

History, the dbcc shrinkdatabase in this ABC db had run twice in the past month, to bring the size from 230 gb to current 160 gb with running time around 120 hours each.

After running DBCC ShrinkDatabase(ABC, 10) for 220 hours since last week, I cancelled the process and reboot the server.

Now, rerun DBCC ShrinkDatabase(ABC, 10) with only 1 minute
DBCC execution completed. If DBCC printed error messages, contact your system administrator.

DBCC CheckDB('ABC') --ok
CHECKDB found 0 allocation errors and 0 consistency errors in database 'ABC'.

dbcc updateusage(ABC) --ok

just try to release the free space to OS
dbcc shrinkdatabase(ABC, truncateonly) --ok

but sp_helpdb ABC, still data portion is 160 gb, log just .5 gb.

thanks for your help!
David