Missing space in C drive

[Indrajit]

When I check the properties of my C drive, it shows 14.7 Gb used
space. But if I select all the folders and files in C drive and check
the properties it shows 9.42 Gb of files and folders. This I did after
displaying the hidden files and folders. Can't figure out where the 5
Gb of missing space is used up?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Indrajit

 

[MAP]

When I check the properties of my C drive, it shows 14.7 Gb used
space. But if I select all the folders and files in C drive and check
the properties it shows 9.42 Gb of files and folders. This I did after
displaying the hidden files and folders. Can't figure out where the 5
Gb of missing space is used up?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Indrajit

http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/

 

[You Know Who ~]

sytem restore and the swapfile (paging file) would account for some.

 

[Indrajit]

Yes it looks like that. Anyway I did a drive check. There seems to
have been some bad sectors. Now the difference has been bought to
around 1 Gb. This may be due to compressed old files. Can anybody tell
me what compressed old files actually are. I mean, I know technically
they are files that have been unused, but why are they compressed and
most importantly they are not showing up?

 

[Bill Blanton]

Yes it looks like that. Anyway I did a drive check. There seems to
have been some bad sectors. Now the difference has been bought to
around 1 Gb.

Bad sectors shouldn't have caused the big difference you saw, however
if you're developing bad sectors on the disk it's time to backup your data
now and prepare for disk failure. Especially so, if chkdsk is catching bad
sectors. It could mean that the HD has run out of spares.

A S.M.A.R.T. analysis of the drive would be useful. To do that, download
and run HDTune on the drive. Look under the "Health" tab for any failures,
and take note of the reallocated sector count.

This may be due to compressed old files. Can anybody tell
me what compressed old files actually are. I mean, I know technically
they are files that have been unused, but why are they compressed and
most importantly they are not showing up?

They are files you chose to compress when you ran the Windows Disk Cleanup
utility(cleanmgr.exe). I would think they would show up.

You will see a difference between doing a "properties" on the drive versus
one all all files. One reason is that the former takes into account file system
overhead, while the latter just adds up total file sizes (or "Size on disk").