Magical Used/Unused Space on my HDD!

[NerdUprising]

What the hell is going on here? I hope I am missing something blatantly obvious, but my hard drive seems to be 20 or so gigs more full than it appears... which is irritating.

Any idea what is going on, or better yet, how to fix it?


many thanks

 

[LordOfLA]

run chkdsk /f and see what happens

 

[ming]

You've probably not taken into account the Hidden and/or System files. But when I checked on my 6GB partition, I also found that there was a descrepency of approximately 400MB after showing EVERY file.

 

[LordOfLA]

windows hiden files dont ammount to 20odd gb. What may be a possibility is system restore, try cleaning out all your old restore points and run chkdsk /f to catch any other errors that my be filesystem related as opposed to files that weren't counted.

 

[Maveric169]

The size on disk is smaller than the actual size because of of compressed files. Windows compresses old files and files not used on a regular basis. Even though these files are compressed windows will still say the full un-copressed size is used because it holds the full uncompressed size as allocated for when it needs to un-compress those files.

As you can see mine does the same thing.

 

[Admiral Michael]

Mine seems fine. I have System Restore disabled.

[EDIT]I also noticed you both have indexing enabled, I have it disabled. I don't kno if this would make a difference.[/EDIT]

 

[Maveric169]

Mine seems fine. I have System Restore disabled.

[EDIT]I also noticed you both have indexing enabled, I have it disabled. I don't kno if this would make a difference.[/EDIT]

You have a .2GB differnece also ours is just a larger difference probley because of system restore and indexing, the index files are compressed also by default.

 

[NerdUprising]

This is the result of running chkdsk /f, cleaning system restore, double checking and adding each subfolder in C:/ directory by hand while hidden and protected system files were showing. Which had all been done prior to the starting of the thread, anyway, but I did again just in case.

I don't want to bother reformatting or any business like that, since I just reinstalled the operating system on this partition (it should be said that this problem came BEFORE reinstalling)

thanks for the advice so far

 

[Maveric169]

Well there is no reason to worry about it, it is normal. There is no problem with your system. Everyones system will show the same thing from one extent to another. This just the way WinXP handles files.

 

[Admiral Michael]

I was wondering whats the difference between size and size on disk?

 

[yoyo]

Are there several useraccounts on your computer? Windows will report private folders of other user accounts as 0 bytes, although they may contain several GB of data.

 

[ozzy_james]

Sounds similar to a problem I had once. when I went into disk management, I think in the computer managment window, the amount of space being used was correctly displayed and my computer information updated itself to reflect this. Unfortunatly I never found a simple permanent solution to this, but all seemed fine after a reinstall of windows.

 

[NerdUprising]

Are there several useraccounts on your computer? Windows will report private folders of other user accounts as 0 bytes, although they may contain several GB of data.

yeeeeeeeeeeeees... there are, but not in the normal sense - when I did a fresh install of windows, I used the same user name, but it didn't write over the old documents/settings folder of that name (instead stuck a new one with the computer's name affixed to the end)... it displays that particular folder as 0 bytes, so I assumed that the files were nuked, but the directory remained...

any idea how to delete it, in that case? (of course, it says "access denied every time I try to do anything to it-went into safe mode under both the admin account, and the only other account on the computer, which also has admin rights)

 

[j79zlr]

While in safemode, take ownership of the files/folders and you can then delete them.

 

[NerdUprising]

problem = solved, thank you very much for your input, everyone, but many thanks to yoyo and j79zlr.