Insufficient Disc Capacity Despite 50% Free Space

[Long Suffering Bear]

I have a Dell 9300 laptop loaded with 32 bit Windows XP Professional. When I
am working on a Word document, during an automatic backup, I will get a
message that the computer has insufficient hard drive capacity to made the
backup -- and this usually leads to a loss of data. To make room, I have
removed a lot of my data off the C drive, have run defrag, removed temp
files, etc. It seems like the problem happens when by 70GB hard drive is
half full (50% free space). This makes me think that somehow, I am only
getting the use of half the hard drive. I suspect a partition issue (e.g.
FAT32 limits to partition to 32GB, so 35+GB go unused). However, I am not
sure, and do not know how to fix. Help me Mr. Wizard!!!

 

[Richard Urban]

I have a Dell 9300 laptop loaded with 32 bit Windows XP Professional. When
I
am working on a Word document, during an automatic backup, I will get a
message that the computer has insufficient hard drive capacity to made the
backup -- and this usually leads to a loss of data. To make room, I have
removed a lot of my data off the C drive, have run defrag, removed temp
files, etc. It seems like the problem happens when by 70GB hard drive is
half full (50% free space). This makes me think that somehow, I am only
getting the use of half the hard drive. I suspect a partition issue (e.g.
FAT32 limits to partition to 32GB, so 35+GB go unused). However, I am not
sure, and do not know how to fix. Help me Mr. Wizard!!!

What does Drive Management show about your drive? Does it show unallocated
space? If so, create another partition in that space so it can be utilized.

 

[Daave]

I have a Dell 9300 laptop loaded with 32 bit Windows XP Professional.
When I am working on a Word document, during an automatic backup, I
will get a message that the computer has insufficient hard drive
capacity to made the backup -- and this usually leads to a loss of
data. To make room, I have removed a lot of my data off the C drive,
have run defrag, removed temp files, etc. It seems like the problem
happens when by 70GB hard drive is half full (50% free space). This
makes me think that somehow, I am only getting the use of half the
hard drive. I suspect a partition issue (e.g. FAT32 limits to
partition to 32GB, so 35+GB go unused). However, I am not sure, and
do not know how to fix. Help me Mr. Wizard!!!

How many partitions do you have? How large are they and how much free
space do you have on each?

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I have a Dell 9300 laptop loaded with 32 bit Windows XP Professional. When I
am working on a Word document, during an automatic backup, I will get a
message that the computer has insufficient hard drive capacity to made the
backup -- and this usually leads to a loss of data. To make room, I have
removed a lot of my data off the C drive,

OK.


have run defrag,

But that does *nothing* to increase the amount of free space. It
rearranges what's on the drive, but does not delete anything.

removed temp files,

OK, but that's not likely to get you much free space unless it's been
a very long time since you've done it.

etc.

Exactly what is included within that "etc."?

It seems like the problem happens when by 70GB hard drive is
half full (50% free space). This makes me think that somehow, I am only
getting the use of half the hard drive. I suspect a partition issue (e.g.
FAT32 limits to partition to 32GB, so 35+GB go unused). However, I am not
sure, and do not know how to fix. Help me Mr. Wizard!!!

Several points (and questions) here:

1. What the hard drive manufacturer calls 70GB is actually
70,000,000,000 bytes. What Windows calls a GB is 2 to the 30th power
(1,073,741,824) bytes. So, although you think you have a 70GB drive
it's really only a little over 65GB.

2. Is your drive FAT32? How do you know? Did it come that way or did
you create the FAT32 partition?

3. Be aware that although Windows XP can not create a FAT32 partition
larger than 32GB, it will happily use one if it was created
externally. So if you got the system with the partition already
created, it may in fact be larger than 32GB even if it's FAT32.

4. You need to know exactly how many partitions your drive has, what
file system each one uses, and how big each partition is. From the
questions you've asked, I suspect that you don't. So please do the
following: double-click My Computer, and look to see what hard drives
(actually partitions) are shown there. Right-click each hard drive and
choose Properties, which will tell you the file system and size of
each drive. Please report back here with what you find.

5. How do you know the drive is "half full (50% free space)"? Exactly
where do you see that and exactly what does it say there?

 

[Gerry]

Select Start, All Programs, accessories, System Tools, Disk CleanUp,
More Options, System Restore and remove all but the latest System
Restore point. Run Defragmenter

Open Disk Defragmenter and click on Analyse. Select View Report and
click on Save As and Save. Now find VolumeC.txt in your My Documents
Folder and post a copy.

--


Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

[Shenan Stanley]

I have a Dell 9300 laptop loaded with 32 bit Windows XP
Professional. When I am working on a Word document, during an
automatic backup, I will get a message that the computer has
insufficient hard drive capacity to made the backup -- and this
usually leads to a loss of data. To make room, I have removed a
lot of my data off the C drive, have run defrag, removed temp
files, etc. It seems like the problem happens when by 70GB hard
drive is half full (50% free space). This makes me think that
somehow, I am only getting the use of half the hard drive. I
suspect a partition issue (e.g. FAT32 limits to partition to 32GB,
so 35+GB go unused). However, I am not sure, and do not know how
to fix. Help me Mr. Wizard!!!

Use NTFS.

Know that the maximum single file size you can get using FAT32 is 4GB. If
your backup is getting larger than that - that could be your problem.

 

[John E. Carty]

(e.g. FAT32 limits to partition to 32GB,
FAT32 partitions can be up to around 8TB, but if you are using XP to format
the partition you will be limited to 32GB.

However, I am not sure, and do not know how