Escaped Disc Space

[ianpants69]

When I looked at my computer earlier today I had about 8gigs of free space on my D drive, now I only have 2 gigs (according to the my computer screen) however if I select all on the drive (including hidden files) and check the properties it tells me I have 10 gigs free (64.5 of 74.5 used). I that weren't strange enough i have done little more than check the internet today and certainly not moved around that much data.

Upon further inspection I find that all of my drives are showing the same anomally (spelling?) and I am 'missing' about 20 gigs of drive space. I have emptied the Norton protected recycle bin. I can't work it out at all.. what am I missing???

Any advice gratefully received...

[billzant]

Dear ianpants69,

How are you?

I don’t know whether this is the answer but it might work. Run what is called scandisk:-

Open My computer from the desktop.

Right click the drive you are concerned about and click on properties

One of the tabs is tools, click on that, and then click “check now”.

The system will then run scandisk. It might have to run after a restart so allow that so save any work before running the scandisk.

If that is not the answer I doubt if I can help, but if you report the results I will check the thread.

Hope you are keeping well,

All the Best

Bill Z

[Richard-BKK]

I see that your user folders are blue, what normally indicates that you are using a compression. With the file system compression switched on, MS Windows can only “guess” how much free space you have, a 1MB jpg file will compress much less then a 1MB MS Word file.

[Wash]

I would suggest checking each drive under My Computer and then right click Properties and select the option to clean up files and see what kind of stuff it suggests removing.

If that doesn't give me good results would then go to: http://safety.live.com/site/en-US/scanner/default_scan.htm and let them scan the system for you online.

One other option to consider is using System Restore to go back to a system date that you know all was working correctly, even though if there is some kind of Virus or other hog in your system you may still have to do the scan.

Good luck.

[Guest Reimar]

When I looked at my computer earlier today I had about 8gigs of free space on my D drive, now I only have 2 gigs (according to the my computer screen) however if I select all on the drive (including hidden files) and check the properties it tells me I have 10 gigs free (64.5 of 74.5 used). I that weren't strange enough i have done little more than check the internet today and certainly not moved around that much data.

Upon further inspection I find that all of my drives are showing the same anomally (spelling?) and I am 'missing' about 20 gigs of drive space. I have emptied the Norton protected recycle bin. I can't work it out at all.. what am I missing???

Any advice gratefully received...

If it is true, you really have more than 70 GByte in your My Documents as data files? May there's a lot of rubbish which need to clean out!

Not forget to change the attributes from hidden and read only files. Also go to => Tools => Folder Options => View and check: Show Hidden Files and Folders and un-check: Hide protected Operating System Files in Windows Explorer. May be you also need to restart your comp in Safe Mopde to delete some files!

After deleting, run defrag to clarify the hdd.

[Richard-BKK]

Hiden files etc are not the real problem, the problem is you just have to much data on your hard disk, go to Panthip and buy a bigger one.

The difference in free space is because you have several folders compressed (click with the right mouse button on your My Documents and select Properties then Advanced, here you will see that your My Documents and some other folders are compressed)

Also your Temp folder is compressed, compression works well on MS Word, Excel and other text related files. But Windows Compression doesn't work well on high copressed JPG or MPG files.

Microsoft file system copression works like this, say you have 72GB of MS Word files, and the hard drive is 80GB. Microsoft filesystem compression can reduce MS Word files about 60%, because the overall compression is 60% MS Windows will report more then 40% free space. If you now copy a 5MB JPG or MPG file into that folder the whole predition of free space is lost, because Microsoft Filesystem compression is in some cases only able to reduce this sort of files with 1%.

** Careful messing with hidden files in a Compressed folder can be dangerus and can cause unrecoverable data lose **

Edited September 18, 2006 by Richard-BKK

[ianpants69]

Dear ianpants69,

How are you?

I don’t know whether this is the answer but it might work. Run what is called scandisk:-

Open My computer from the desktop.

Right click the drive you are concerned about and click on properties

One of the tabs is tools, click on that, and then click “check now”.

The system will then run scandisk. It might have to run after a restart so allow that so save any work before running the scandisk.

If that is not the answer I doubt if I can help, but if you report the results I will check the thread.

Hope you are keeping well,

All the Best

Bill Z

Hi,

done that, it took a while so it must have done some good and did free a coule of hundred megs but not all the missing space.

thanks

ian

[ianpants69]

I see that your user folders are blue, what normally indicates that you are using a compression. With the file system compression switched on, MS Windows can only “guess” how much free space you have, a 1MB jpg file will compress much less then a 1MB MS Word file.

That it definitely true, however; I have also lost about 5 gigs on my C drive through the same problem and that drive is not compressed....

[ianpants69]

When I looked at my computer earlier today I had about 8gigs of free space on my D drive, now I only have 2 gigs (according to the my computer screen) however if I select all on the drive (including hidden files) and check the properties it tells me I have 10 gigs free (64.5 of 74.5 used). I that weren't strange enough i have done little more than check the internet today and certainly not moved around that much data.

Upon further inspection I find that all of my drives are showing the same anomally (spelling?) and I am 'missing' about 20 gigs of drive space. I have emptied the Norton protected recycle bin. I can't work it out at all.. what am I missing???

Any advice gratefully received...

If it is true, you really have more than 70 GByte in your My Documents as data files? May there's a lot of rubbish which need to clean out!

Not forget to change the attributes from hidden and read only files. Also go to => Tools => Folder Options => View and check: Show Hidden Files and Folders and un-check: Hide protected Operating System Files in Windows Explorer. May be you also need to restart your comp in Safe Mopde to delete some files!

After deleting, run defrag to clarify the hdd.

Yup,

I have about 60 gigs of music for a start...

Did what you said and found the following files which I hadn't seen before.. (screen shot attached) when I right clicked it gave me the option of purging files from all drives and I have all my space back....

Thank you very much.

What is strange however is that emptying the Norton protected recycle bin in the normal way didn't do this... an error or user stupidity?

Edited September 19, 2006 by ianpants69

[ianpants69]

Thanks everyone for their help..

[Guest Reimar]

You do have a DVD burner! Why you don't burn your music files, I thinks it's MP3, to DVD's and free up a lot of space? Even all data you need rarly you should burn to DVD! We using DVD-RW in our company and that works very well: never out of space!!

[ianpants69]

You do have a DVD burner! Why you don't burn your music files, I thinks it's MP3, to DVD's and free up a lot of space? Even all data you need rarly you should burn to DVD! We using DVD-RW in our company and that works very well: never out of space!!

Because I like to have my music immediately available through my media player