have you seen 10% of my HD? it's missing...

theCzar

I have a 70.9 Gb hard-drive, if I add up the space taken up by all the files on my hard drive (by selecting all the contents/subsdirectories of C: folder, right clicking, getting properties) I find i'm using 42.4Gb (on the disk).

I've got 19.6 Gb free, 70.9 - 42.4 is not 19.6, in fact its 28.5 Gb. Now I've always assumed that the sizes are estimates, and that windows doesn't count every byte, but it seems 10% is a bit too wide of the mark.

incidently, there's no hidden files or folders, the recycle bin is empty.

any ideas?

Cungi

Is it a Dell? Dell pcs afaik have a hidden partition for diagnostics n stuff. Could be wrong though

The_B_Man

i know wit a 120gb i had, it was reporting 110gb. but possibly there was a hidden partition on it.

my current 200gb GDD is showing 185gb total, so...

i tihnk its to do with bits and bytes and 1,000 and 1,024 etc etc.

EOA_Mushy

Seems a bit much even for this, but have you added and deleted a lot of files from the drive since your last defrag? If the answer is excesivly then i could account for lost space....

themole

is 70.9 the formatted size?

you always loose a load to formatting.

even if it is, the size of the files and size they take up on disk are not the same.

so, make sure you are looking at the size on disc number.

also, by there are no hidden files i presume you mean you have selected to show all hidden files and folders?

Standard Toaster

A file might be 500bytes but takes up 4,096bytes on your drive depending on the allocation unit size. 512 bytes being the smallest and 4096 being the largest (afaik)
If you have alot of small files they'll take up more room on the hdd.

peckerhead

Are you using a Torrent client that's set to 'pre-allocate' space?

_CreeD_

Manufacturers advertise capacities as if 1K=1000,M=1,000,000 etc. Basically in base 10 values. Which is a complete and utter falacy that should have been illegalised years ago as false or at least misleading advertising. Computers as you know are binary/base2, that's how windows will count your space. So, 1k=1024, 1m=1,048,576 and so on. Basically by the time you hit the Gigabyte stage the advertised capacity is about 107% of the 'real' capacity. A 70GB drive will show as having a max. of just over 65GB (multiply the stated value by .93)

Alkers

Windows restore points?

Tony H

first if you can download a copy of TreeSize Professional 3 you can use this to have a look at what is taking up your space ,then open a window and go to tools , folder options ,view and change the hidden folder options to show all hidden folders and untick the hide proteced system files , this will enable you to see a folder called RECYCLER ,have a look in there and see if there is any big files in there , also have a look in the folder called System Volume Information and see how big a chunk of your hard drive is been taken up by system restore IF YOU DELETE ANY FILES FROM SYSTEM VOLUME INFO YOU WILL LOOSE YOUR RESTORE POINTS, you can delete any files from RECYCLER safely
ps the paging file can take up another gig

Karoma

^ as above... and by default, i believe the Recycle Bin _reserves_ 10% of space... right-click on the bin->properties to change the space used..

Explosive_Cornflake

Also, you have to remeber cluster sizes on my small files and fragments, and 1 byte file will still take up 4k on a standard ntfs clusster, or 32 k on fat32!

Capt'n Midnight

Nah use spacemonger - gives you a visual impression
With treesize there is an option to show wasted space , there is also an option to use CD cluster size (512 bytes - same as most NTFS drives) for comparison

If you have FAT32 a lot of space will be wasted because of the way files are stored. Even a one byte file will take a full block.

Great fun with FAT16, people would have 20,000 files on their OLD hard drive and when they get a new one 10 times the size the drive might only have just over 32,000 blocks - result new drive instantly 2/3rds full.


find out how many files on the drive - if using FAT run CHKDSK at the dos prompt

17,883,232 KB in 160,261 files.

       16,384 bytes in each allocation unit.
    1,203,781 total allocation units on disk.

so 16KB per allocation unit - pretend on average half full
set /a a=160261*(16384/2)
1312849920
1,312,849,920 bytes wasted. - on a 20GB drive !

If you converted to NTFS much of that would be recovered before you add the option of compression, but you'd loose the ability to repair problems using any other OS.

subway

with windows youll lose space to page file.
and hibernate if enabled.

run this handy prog -
http://www.stevengould.org/downloads/cleanup/CleanUp40.exe
web page - http://www.stevengould.org/software/cleanup/download.html

itll clear temp files you never new existed,
i once lost 4 gigs installing nero when something went funky....

DemonOfTheFall

Windows swapfile and hibernate will be stealing a fair bit of disk space from you, up to 3 gigs. Another fair bit will go to wasted cluster space (50 byte file taking up 4,096 bytes on your disk).

_CreeD_

Pagefile, Hibernate, restore points etc. are all visible. So they won't contribute tot he problem at hand (He said he added up the files/folders). Its the base2/base10 issue and cluster size/wastage.

theCzar

the advertised capacity is 80Gb, so it's 70.9 after any formatting. I've explicity said to show hidden files. I don't use Torrent

I'm going to defrag out of curiousity, but even though i haven't done it since i got my machine a 1+1/2 years ago, i doubt it's hogging what i'm missing.

thanks for all the suggestions... I shall investigate some of those mentioned.

Cuddlesworth

I heard of this happening to some drives when they were about to die. Every format it just kept losing more and more space

_CreeD_

theCzar wrote:

I'm going to defrag out of curiousity, but even though i haven't done it since i got my machine a 1+1/2 years ago....

:eek:

ressem

Unused System restore space appears as free space. The used c:\system volume information won't be available to spacemonger and other tools unless you add the permission settings on it and it's subentries to allow administrator to view. Which is discouraged.


Worst case:
SMART quietly removing bad sectors from use.

Next worst:
It could be a corrupt NTFS partition. Nastiest incidence I've seen was a domain controller with a 5GB system partition and 1.7 GB of files displaying 99 MB of free space. Scandisk, defrags didn't have an effect. Made an image of the disk, placed in some low level analysis tools and found a load of orphaned directory entries that needed to be cleared by handediting the MFT.

Doing this on a live machine is iffy, so machine was just formatted.



Might be worth backing up, checking whether the HDD manufacturer has a low level diagnostic tools image available for download, trying the nondestructive diagnostic tests to count available sectors.

alantc

You probably use norton protected recycle bin and haven't purged the protected files.

srdb20

Alright man just had a quick glance here and maybe its been mentioned, not sure.

You dont ahve a load of hidden files somewhere or anything like that!

Happened to me before, had hidden files equating to 3Gb

Just a thought!!!

Explosive_Cornflake

Try this little utility
I found somewhere, not sure, but it's well handy.
scn2.zip

theCzar

alantc wrote:

You probably use norton protected recycle bin and haven't purged the protected files.

i do. but i did. you should have seen the figure before i purged

Airblazer

yep..you should allow about 10% of your hard drive for the 1m=1024 answer..it's worse on the ipods...my 20g is only about 18.6 which is within the spec..