Hard Drive memory problem

[PeaceOut]

Hi Everyone,

I've had this problem with multiple hard drives, but when I delete a file or uninstall a program and go back to check to see if my disk has more space available, the free space doesn't change. (This occurs both on OS partition and extra storage partitions)

- I had norton Ghost installed and but uninstalled it along with the whole norton restore thing.
- I did empty the recycle bin
- I did a windows provided disk cleanup
- I would like to defrag but i don't have enough space.

If just feels like the memory isn't freeing up. I'm not sure what it is that taking up so much space. When i right click on C:\ and check the properties it tells me that I have used up 14.5gigs of the 15gigs available but then i go into the drive and check the file size of each individual folder (i.e "Program Files", "Windows", ...) then add up the files sizes, it doesn't come near the size of 14.5gigs. More like 8gigs.
Where's the rest of my 6gigs go?

I'm juggling with 700mb on my OS drive and would like to free more space.


*edit* The hard drive is NTFS format

 

[fastco]

Give BCwipe a try. Download and install then try the wipe all free space option.

http://www.jetico.com/index.htm#/bcwipe.htm

 

[Tedster]

the directory automatically reserves anticipated space.

 

[pcaceit]

Hi guys,

Seen this before, I think its a mft problem, if you are using diskeeper have a look on the analysis and see if the mft is particullarly large (like 50% of the disk).

think i cleared mine by turning off system restore and booting from second install and deleting page file and system volume information folder, also went into Recycler Folder on each partition and deleted all the recycle bins that system would allow. system recreates all the above anyway.

probably got a corrupt recycler as well

hope this helps

 

[PeaceOut]

Hi guys,

Seen this before, I think its a mft problem, if you are using diskeeper have a look on the analysis and see if the mft is particullarly large (like 50% of the disk).

think i cleared mine by turning off system restore and booting from second install and deleting page file and system volume information folder, also went into Recycler Folder on each partition and deleted all the recycle bins that system would allow. system recreates all the above anyway.

probably got a corrupt recycler as well

hope this helps

the problem was partly MFT and mostly corrupt recycle bin. The MFT is badly fragmented so i need to defrag it. But when you install Norton it installs it's wrap around the recycle bin to restore data that you deleted. It puts a folder inside the Reycle Bin. Had to go in there on each partition and delete all the files. 8.2gigs worth stored in there. It gave problems when trying to delete a hidden file so I had to reboot and run the command from dos prompt after uninstalling Norton.

Hope this helps. Thanks for the replies.

 

[Rick]

Sounds like Norton Protected Recycling Bin to me.... Man, that Norton stuff is crap.

Things may not add up when you look at directories individually and that's OK. You may not be taking in account your pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys files located in C:\ as hidden, system files. These files can easily add up to a couple of gigs together.

If you are using XP, there is also System Restore - which you could have missed. It archives its restore points in System Volume Information, which is a hidden system directory located at the root of your drive. You may want to limit or disable this feature to save space, by default it uses 10-15% of your hard drive space.

Then finally there's file system overhead (not much) and corporate lies about the actual capacity of your disk (1GB = 1000MB to drive companies, where it's really about 1024MB) and so on. Storage appears to be a surprisingly inaccurate science.

Seen this before, I think its a mft problem, if you are using diskeeper have a look on the analysis and see if the mft is particullarly large (like 50% of the disk).

The MFT does not count against your free storage total. You can view your MFT information in Windows XP by using the built-in defrag tool (or other third party utilities).