HDD Free Space doesn't add up

[PUX]

I have a Maxtor 40gb hard drive. It reads that 38.1 is available for overall use, and there is 14.5gb available for free space. I scanned my directories and show added up that 17.34gb are being used, leaving (mathematically) 20.76gb should be available for free space. I've run disk clean up and defragmenter with little success.

Any rationalizations or ideas?

 

[vetteguy]

What filesystem are you using? Fat32 or NTFS? Depending on what OS and FS you use, you will usually see two number, a "size" and then a "size on disk". Maybe you're adding up the wrong numbers.

 

[Pothead]

empty your recycling bin? must be a lot of p0rn in there

 

[PUX]

FAT32 w/WinXP Pro. Also, this is on a secondary drive that is essentially used for backup, ftp transfer, and, yes, my porn stash. (haha)

 

[kazamobah]

How did you scan your directories? Did you highlight all of them in windows explorer and then right click to properties? If that's what you did, double check that show hidden and system files is on.

 

[zephyrprime]

It is possible for the "free space" number on the drive to be wrong because of some sort of previous disk error or disk error. Try running scan disk or norton disk doctor.

 

[inqztive]

Okay, there are a few files and folders which are hidden. So when you scan you are not taking into account any of those. e.g. "pagefile.sys". The size of this file depends on your system. On my comp it's about 800MB. you have "hybernate" then there is another hidden system file which is basically the image of your RAM. So if your RAM is 512 MB this file will take another additional 512MB on your disk. Then there are temporay files. there is system volume information which you don't usually count. These files account for about 1.5 to 2 GB. Hop you find this thing useful.

 

[PUX]

Got it taken care of - although I don't know what happened to since cause this problem. Anyhow, What I learned:

- BIOS only supports up to 32gb. So, $50 to CompUSA I got an ATA/IDE 133 controller card.
- When formatting under FAT 32 & XP, it only allows a 32gb partition - So, it needed to be reformatted as NTFS.

And actually, when doing this, several times...It still didn't recognize the 40gb. I ran a "factory recertification test" from Maxtor (Powermax Diag/Test Utility), and it finally took.

So, I'm finally sane again.

 

[Mday]

the fdisk that came with win98se had problems with drives over 32GB, there is a patch available (new fdisk version).

also, definitely run scandisk.