Hard drive more full than it's supposed to be

[yangly18]

I have this 1Tb external drive that says it only hase 115G left, and I went through all my stuff on the drive and I only have 620G on it. The actual amount of space on the drive total is 930G, but this still doesn't add up. Anyone know what could be taking up extra room, or suggestions on what to do?

Edit: Running check disk right now to see if it can find any corrupted sectors or file errors that are large enough to almost take up 200G

Edit: It's done running, it said that it found some corrupted files and fixed them, but it didn't free up any room on the drive. Now running Disk Defrag

Edit: No fragmentation found, Avira finds no virus' on the drive.

 

[yangly18]

bump, any ideas?

 

[red1776]

what do you mean when you say "went through your stuff"? there are files like C:\windows\winsxs
that most are unaware of that take up considerable space (do not delete winsxs!)
I very much like this program to have a look at what is using space on hard drives.

http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,64425-page,1-c,downloads/description.html

 

[yangly18]

went through my stuff as in....went into the drive, inside I have a few folders, i looked to see what the size of each folder is, and added them up. Don't worry, I used the 'space on disk' number not the actual folder size. The drive did come with a program that tells you what is taking up space on it, it says I have nearly 17G of pictures on it, but then again that could be from all my music files. Also I get 20G of "other" that pops up. I'll try out the program you suggested when I get home, maby it will find something that isn't showing up when I open the drive. Also note that I made sure hidden folders are shown, there are none.

 

[Puiu]

Try and look for hidden folders/files. Try connecting the hdd to another computer and see if anythings shows up (hidden or not)
If you still can't fix this then do a backup (ask a friend for help or something like that and format.

 

[yangly18]

ha, funny thing is this Tb was supposed to be the one I was going to back things up onto. I have so much stuff on it I can't back it up onto another drive unless I get a new one, which isn't an option atm. I also said already that I looked for hidden files and found none. I'll just format my 500G that doesn't have anything I really need on it and put my important things from the terra onto the 500G...looks like format is the only way huh...hoping I wouldn't have to, but guess it's gottta be done

 

[hunter27]

I am no expert but I was trying to make more free space on a small hard drive on our old laptop and as everything else was working ok I turned off system restore then turned it on again but reduced the percentage it could use. Doing this helped me recover a surprising amount of disk space.
pete

 

[dividebyzero]

Harddrive manufacturers measure Gb as 1,000.000 Mbytes when in actuality a Gb is 1,048.756 Mb. So to get the true capacity of a harddrive you need to divide the stated capacity by 1.024 three times:

1,000Mb / 1.024 = 976.5625 / 1.024 = 953.674 / 1.024 = 931.322Mb

Explained here

 

[red1776]

he said that the actual space was 930Gb chef.
did you try the download I suggested to have a look at whats taking up your drive space?
http://redirectingat.com/?id=951X49...fid,64425-page,1-c,downloads/description.html

 

[dividebyzero]

he said that the actual space was 930Gb chef.
did you try the download I suggested to have a look at whats taking up your drive space?
http://redirectingat.com/?id=951X49...fid,64425-page,1-c,downloads/description.html

Looks like a good utility.
Thought 'ol Yangly might have been rounding, and he/she/it might not be taking into account the formatting overhead
Straight cut-and-paste from Wiki

"For a formatted drive, the operating system's file system internal usage is another, although minor, reason why a computer hard drive or storage device's capacity may show its capacity as different from its theoretical capacity. This would include storage for, as examples, a file allocation table (FAT) or inodes, as well as other operating system data structures. This file system overhead is usually less than 1% on drives larger than 100 MB"

Quote from this page buried about a third of the way down for anyone checking the post for future reference.

 

[red1776]

Looks like a good utility.
Thought 'ol Yangly might have been rounding, and he/she/it might not be taking into account the formatting overhead
Straight cut-and-paste from Wiki


Quote from this page buried about a third of the way down for anyone checking the post for future reference.

Great point, that's why i really like Windirstat, I lost count of how many times i recommended it and they say "...ohhhh, i didn't know that was still on there"
usually because it doesn't show up in the add/remove programs when they try to re-capture HDD space.

 

[hughva]

Tree Size is another good utility for this purpose:
http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml