False free space shown on hardrive

[piotrekn]

Hi guys !
Could sombody help me with strange behavior of my hardrive?
I got new 160 GB hardrive which I split to two partition (F: -50GB) and G: - 100GB)
I dowload a lot of files and I use this new hardrive as a storage. Till yesterday I downloaded approx. 30GB to the F: drive which left me with 20GB free. Suddenly I got a message that I am low on disk space. When I checke it, my F: drive showed only 190MB of free space???.
I moved some files (15GB) to the G:drive but this way I freed only 8GB on F:
It look like the files expands in some way. Right now if I like to move my files back where they just been, there is not enough space.
Could sombody tell me what's going on. I checked my whole computer with Norton for viruses, and defragmented all the drives but it did not help.

I am runing Windows XP Home edition.

Thanks for Help :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce:

 

[Nodsu]

How are you downloading? Many downloading programs preallocate the space for the files being downloaded so even if you have only 100KB of a 700MB file it will still use the whole 700MB of disk.

SequoiaView is a pretty program that will tell you in what files your disk space hides in.

 

[patio]

Turn off Norton protection for your recycle bin...
Also check how much space is being allocated to each drive/partition for System Restore.

patio.