Missing disk space

davolente · Joined: Oct 04, 2003 Posts: 304 Location: Kent, UK

Not sure if I am barking up the wrong tree here but I got the impression that one of my older PC's which is only used for mail, a bit of music listening and non-critical stuff, was getting a tad low on space on the main "c" drive, which is a nominal 40 gig. I do appreciate that actual value will be less than this - I was guessing round 33 gig usable.
If I go in to the drive properties, it shows on the pie chart a total drive size of approx. 32 gigs with free space of just under 3 gigs.
Disk management shows an active partition of about 32 gigs, which figures.
If I go into Explorer, however, "select all" (have hidden folders showing in "folder view") for the "c" drive, the total properties size only comes to about 9.8 gigs. Have I really "lost" approx. 20 gigs, somewhere along the way?
If I do the same tricks on one of my other machines, just to check, it all adds up properly.
One third-party disk explorer seems to think the drive is only about 12 gigs total but the same program totals my other computers' drives OK, allowing for the usual discrepancy in stated and usable space. Odd

micker377 · Joined: May 27, 2005 Posts: 994

What OS, and "filetypes" (Fat32, NTFS) are these computers?

davolente · Joined: Oct 04, 2003 Posts: 304 Location: Kent, UK

Oops, sorry folks. Always forgetting that. All bog-standard fully updated XP on NTFS, of course. Just had a little tot-up of separate items on the old machine - again by selecting "all" and going for properties. Windows says "size, 4.17 gigs. Size on disk, 3.2 gigs". There is around 3 gigs of programs and music. Other misc. folders total around 4 gigs and other misc. files in the root of the drive come out to a mere 767 meg, so, even totalling manually, it still looks like I'm short of a full load! "My Documents" are on a second drive.
Managed to re-claim a little bit by running disk clean-up, but I'm still looking at a nominal 40 gig drive with only 2.6 gigs free and the total space used, according to Explorer properties, of around 10 gigs but not according to the disk properties pie chart, which shows "Used space 28.8 GB, Free space, 2.6 GB".
I previously set system restore down to 5%, with monitoring turned off on the other drive.
Am I missing something, somewhere?

goretsky · Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2009 6:03 am Post subject:

Hello,

Could the missing space be attributed to files backed up during service pack installation?

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 1546 Location: Central FL, USA

When I'm working on a PC I don't have the time to play the numbers game.
We all know by now that when you look at a hard drive with different programs, you get different numbers.
It may be fun, but usually not very productive.

There are many places where Windows (any version) stores files that we can eventually just Delete.
I like to go after all those Windows Update UNinstall files and their related .log files. The files will be in the Windows folder and the uninstall files will start with a "$" and the log files will start with "KB".
I also like to delete OLD, out of date, system restore files.

Then go after all the old temp files, prefetch files, recent files, Temporary Internet Files (actually stored in several locations) and Quarantine files created by your Anti-Virus program.

My XPCleanup batch file cleans out all these junk files (mentioned in the above sentence) in just seconds. I put a shortcut to this batch file in my startup folder for a daily Cleanup. I can also run it from a desktop shortcut as part of my Weekly (not weakly) hard drive maintenance routine.

If you've not yet disabled "Hibernate" on your computer, you also have a rather large file in your root directory, called "Hiberfil.sys".
Disabling Hibernate will get rid of that BIG file.

I just cleaned up a Hard Drive for a customer and removed ten installs of AOL.
That and other junk files, many that I've mentioned above, represented about 15 gigs of space on their HD.

Good luck getting your space back,

The Doctor Cool

zzron357 · Joined: Oct 14, 2004 Posts: 43

Hi Davolente,
You said you have a second drive on this system
Any chance the second drive is really a 2nd partiton
on the first drive? Also, there may be a small hidden
partition. Right click "my computer" -- select manage
then disk management. This should give a picture
of all drives and all partitions.
No doubt, the updates (esp. SP3) take up a lot of space.
Is anyone collecting itunes on this pc? They are the
biggest offenders I have found on systems used by teens.
Best wishes, zzron

davolente · Joined: Oct 04, 2003 Posts: 304 Location: Kent, UK

Hi zzron357.
Second drive is a real-live physical one and if you glance back, I have already checked disk management and it says I have a 32 Gig partition, with just a few meg unallocated (don't know why that is) which is about what I would expect from a nominal 40 gig drive. I can't seem to tally with what appears to be on the drive, looking via Windows Explorer (including hidden stuff) with the size of the partition and what little free space there is left - allegedly!.
The 40 gig drive isn't the original, by the way. The original (being an elderly machine) was a mere 12 gig and I cloned it to the 40 gig drive, taking the option to expand the partition to fill the drive from the cloning program, run from a floppy, which made sense and I wonder if there's something odd happened here.

micker377 · Joined: May 27, 2005 Posts: 994

Some of the smaller hard drives had jumpers on the back, to limit the size for the older systems. Have you checked to see how these jumpers are set?

zlim · Joined: Mar 11, 2005 Posts: 2636

Baby_Tux · Joined: Mar 06, 2007 Posts: 924

Is this the drive that is showing unallocated space? If so, then there is your missing space, most likely. Or it could be a "hidden" partition. (see what fdisk says)

My hunch is that you didn't "blow away" all the partitions on your destination drive before working with it & when cloning, it cloned to the selected partition & resized it accordingly.

As you stated, the drive can vary a bit in size between designated & actual. But this shouldn't be by very much as all it is supposed to be is rounding to the nearest size. Some drives have the "actual" size on them, others the manufacturers site usually gives such info.

I seem to recall, (can't remember the brand) that one manufacturer was under fire for making HD's that were a lot smaller than they were supposed to be. Been a few years so it COULD have been in this era, but not sure.

BTW: NEVER trust M$'s size readout for an accurate measurement - FDISK or a good partitioning / diag. program should be of better use for this.

zzron357 · Joined: Oct 14, 2004 Posts: 43

Hi Davolente,
Do you have access to any linux live-cds, such as Gparted,
Partition Magic, or Puppy Linux? There are others.
They all have Gparted available. This is a partition editor.
I use Puppy mostly -- but it is gparted that can tell you
how the drive is partitioned. And, if the original resizing
missed something, gparted may be able to finalize the
resizing. I use it almost daily to repartition and resize.
If you have none of these, at www.puppylinux.org you can get
a 100 Mb iso, and burn this image to a cd. Boot live-cd
and find gparted.
I seem to remember also, the later Ubuntu cd's have a
neat graphic display of disk usage -- if that is the real
issue here. There are several such programs for windows,
but I am not recalling names of those.
I resize partitions for multiple boot of windoz and linux,
with linux swap space. Best wishes, zzron
PS: Dear old Techworm boot floppy has a partitioning
program I use to check partitions occasionally -- especially
fat16 and fat32.