On Wed, 1 Dec 2010 06:51:47 -0800 (PST),
(E-Mail Removed)
wrote:
>Greetings:
>
>I am having a problem whereby my disk is reporting as FULL (123MB
>remaining on a 18.6GB drive)
>
>ODDITY 1:
>When I add up the sizes of the files on the drive, it comes to just
>under 13GB. Even adding in space reserved for system restore, this
>takes it to 15GB
>
>ODDITY 2:
>Running disk clean-up, it shows that it should recover approximately
>2GB.....but after running and even rebooting, the available space
>jumped up to only about 400MB....and then on subsequent reboot when
>back to only 123MB.
>
>How can I find out what is taking up the free space on the drive and
>remove it?
>
>Thank you!
First of all, an 18GB drive probably belongs in a museum. For $30 to
$60 you can pick up a new drive with 10x-20x the capacity. Then you
could stop worrying about a few Megabytes.
System Restore takes some space. Disable it if space is more important
than protection.
Make sure the Recycle Bin is empty. When you delete files, they get
marked for deletion and moved to the Recycle Bin, but they are usually
not immediately deleted.
Windows uses some drive space for its own housekeeping. For example,
if this is your boot drive, there will be a potentially large (and
hidden) pagefile.sys in the root folder, among other system files.
When you format a drive, sectors are created of a fixed size. Stored
files don't always fit neatly into those fixed size sectors. The
unused space, or slack, is wasted, and the situation is worse if the
drive holds more small files.
If you have 123MB free and you try to store a file bigger than that,
Windows will report that the drive is full because the file you're
trying to store simply won't fit. So even though the drive has 123MB
free, it's full as far as Windows is concerned when the file you're
trying to save won't fit.
Those are a few of the things to consider. Your best options appear to
be to delete some files, add a second drive, or replace the existing
drive with a bigger one.
--
Char Jackson
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