missing space on hard drive

[Guest]

after running CHKDSK on a 6Gb HHD I get these results..
6337610 KB total disk space.
4187002 KB in 16549 files.
5188 KB in 1585 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
57223 KB in use by the system.
33744 KB occupied by the log file.
2088197 KB available on disk.
But I have only loaded 2 gb of info this new install wich leaves me
about 2 Gb short

 

[Chad Harris]

Perhaps the *page file and hidden files* aren't included in this total.
Also with the limited amount of real estate you have relative to what's
around these days, I'd hit the Windows and Pause Break keys, click the
System Restore Tab on the System Properties box, and scale back System
Restore. It defaults to 12% and I can't imagine anyone making use of that
much SR real estate nor why the SR XP team at Redmond defaulted that
humongous amount of space for SR.

You can get a nice actual visual assessment map of what is taking up your HD
real estate by downloading DX Hog Hunt here (free) from the people at DVXP:

http://www.dvxp.com/en/Downloads.aspx

Chad Harris



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[Chad Harris]

Herbiee--

I also didn't mention a fairly frequent practice of many OEM manufacturers
to make hidden partitions for various repair or recovery processes that may
account for some of this discrepancy. Dell has done this for years in many
of their machines. IBM recovery disks have reformatted the HD and preset
partitions. Their new approach is to have a recovery option on a hidden
partition which will reformat the entire drive, eliminating the chance of
the customer losing a recovery disk. This is accessible by an F11 boot in
addition to the XP Pro install CD in an I386 folder on the visible part of
the partition.

Often these hidden drives don't show in Explorer, and sometimes 3rd party
partition managers like Partition Magic will expose them.

Chad Harris

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