message
Thanks to all who replied!
....
I do have Norton Systemworks and Ghost running.
Pops, regarding my hard drive I only show 1 drive letter, the
standard C. C:
shows 18.3GB free and 19.8 GB used.
Are those the numbers you see if you right click on C in Explorer
and click on Properties? Which method are you using to get those
numbers?
Just sort of thinking out loud here:
Apparently you have a 40 Gig drive, too. If you have Norton's
GoBack installed, then by default it's reserving 10% disk space
for itself, which would be about 4 Gig made unavailable.
If Hibernate is enabled in the OS, that could explain a few
more Gig unavailable. See if you have a large hibernate file in
the root directory.
Also, Restore can reserve a pretty fair amount of room for
itself, too.
And then you have the ever-necessary Pagefile, which can be
yet another few Gig of space reserved if something has glitched
or someone set it unreasonably large and it's not being recovered
properly. I think windows normally figures about 1.5 to 2 times
the amount of RAM for the max pagefile size.
If it's an OEM installed system, there may be a hidden
partition on drive C that is actually your recovery data; do you
know if you have that? It would use up a few Gig, also.
Other programs can sometimes require large disk space
reserves, too, so they might be worth checking on.
Some of the various "reserved" disk spaces may or may not show up
in system calculations; that's why I asked how you were getting
the numbers for free space vs. used space.
For example:
If I right on C and click Properties, it shows me 39 Gig used and
18 Gig free.
But, if instead I select all the files on C, a different way of
doing it, the used space shows as 32 Gig and 25 Gig free.
That's a 7 Gig difference in the used space on the same disk.
I won't bore you with details, but that 7 Gig works out
about right when I consider the various "reserved" spaces
programs keep for themselves.
There are ways to test to see what's up and whether everything's
really normal, but they would involve losing history as in
Restore Points, GoBack restore points if you have them, pagefile
fiddling and things like that, probably not really something you
should get into as a neophyte, especially since you plan to call
Dell/Maxtor. I would recommend Dell first, BTW.
BTW, should someone try to get into explaining the differences
between how a "k" might be 1,000 or 1024 depending, and so on,
that is not what is causing your confusion.
Your question won't resolve around "slack space" either,
unless you're using something unknown to me to measure drive
space used/free. Slack space -could- be an issue if you use
something other than XP or standard programs to measure space
with, but I doubt very much that's the issue.
I guess I'll call Dell or Maxtor, if no one else is familiar
with the problem.
I will keep watching out and if & when I find out the problem I
will post it.
Thanks again!
Donna
Dunno about others, but I'd appreciate hearing back if/when you
get it figured out; good idea, thanks.
Regards,
Pop
