Wrong disk usage?

[John]

I'm trying to figure out how much free space on my hard drive. I have
a 120gb Hard drive.

When I right click the drive in 'My Computer' and look at the
properties it says that I have used 76.0 gb of my space. Now if I go
into the C: drive highlight all the files (including hidden/system etc)
and look at the properties. It says that they are 68.0 gb in size.
Shouldn't these two numbers be the same?

I also use the program JDiskReport to analyze the c: drive. It says i
have 68.0gb taken up as well. I can't figure out why there would be
such a big difference. The c: drive is formatted with NTFS by the way.
I would appreciate any comments. Thanks

 

[Guest]

John I would be willing to bet that C:\System Volume Information is taking up
a good bit of that unknown space if not all of it. Try right clicking it and
selecting properties it will probably show as 0 KB then go in and if you have
XP Pro take ownership of it...

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/308421

Make sure to select replace owner on all subcontainers. Apply it and ok
it. Then right click the folder and check the properties it should now show
you the correct size. If it still says 0 KB then try and access it. If you
are denied access then you did somethin wrong when taking ownership do it
again. Good Luck,

Joe

Kemco IT Tech

 

[Guest]

John:

There's a few issues at play.

I have a PC where the PC is sold as with a 150Gig, but the actual formatted
capacity is only at 147Gigs.

The HD has a logical partition taking up almost 6Gigs, for data recovery,
reducing the available disk space on C:\ to 141Gigs, even before the 1st
piece of data gone on to the C Drive.

So, it's 9 gigs off already. In other words, bought a PC with 150Gig HD,
zero bytes in files, remaining space 141Gigs.

Then each file no matter how small, takes up 4,096 bytes, and takes space at
4,096 bytes, not counted in the file size, which measures actual size in
bytes. Over several hundred thousand files, you're off by quite a few bytes.
Try an experiment where you create a file with "one" character, the remaining
disk size goes down 4,096 bytes, and total files should go up by only one
byte.

Then there's "overhead" which I'm not sure how's calculated.

You can readily see that substracting the byte used totals for all files
less the HD size will never equal the free space.

 

[John]

Hey,
Thanks very much. You were right. Now I at least how the space is
being taken up.
John