Phantom App's Use of HDD??

[Teflon]

I recently bought an external 250GB HDD. I fired it up, plugged it in
to the USB port on my XP/Pro machine and checked 'Properties', it
showed 71.7 MB as already being 'Used'. I hadn't done a thing to put
any data on the drive, no files are anything else showed up on the Win
Explorer tree.

What was using that 71.7 MB? Does it need to use it? If not, how do
I get it back?

This is the third USB HDD I've attached to this system. Is it
possible that some phantom app is using 71.7 MB on the other 2 HDD's
as well?

This phantom app wouldn't happen to be XP, would it? If so, why the
hidden files?

 

[Robert Jacobs]

I recently bought an external 250GB HDD. I fired it up, plugged it in
to the USB port on my XP/Pro machine and checked 'Properties', it
showed 71.7 MB as already being 'Used'. I hadn't done a thing to put
any data on the drive, no files are anything else showed up on the Win
Explorer tree.

What was using that 71.7 MB? Does it need to use it? If not, how do
I get it back?

This is the third USB HDD I've attached to this system. Is it
possible that some phantom app is using 71.7 MB on the other 2 HDD's
as well?

This phantom app wouldn't happen to be XP, would it? If so, why the
hidden files?

Just formatting the hard drive will take up some space. If you have
purchased a new flash drive, or, really, any other storage device, the
initial format of the drive uses up some physical space. The bigger
the drive, the more space is used to format it.

 

[smlunatick]

I recently bought an external 250GB HDD. I fired it up, plugged it in
to the USB port on my XP/Pro machine and checked 'Properties', it
showed 71.7 MB as already being 'Used'. I hadn't done a thing to put
any data on the drive, no files are anything else showed up on the Win
Explorer tree.

What was using that 71.7 MB? Does it need to use it? If not, how do
I get it back?

This is the third USB HDD I've attached to this system. Is it
possible that some phantom app is using 71.7 MB on the other 2 HDD's
as well?

This phantom app wouldn't happen to be XP, would it? If so, why the
hidden files?

It could be that the external HDD has "packaged" software that may get
installed automatically when the drive is detect? I know the the
Western Digital MyBook hard drives also have the drivers/diagnostics/
software on it, like the included CD.

 

[DL]

A format wont use 71mb
What does Disk Management say?

 

[Bruce Sanderson]

The file system itself takes space. For example, there is a bit map that
has one bit for each free "cluster" and a chain of all the free clusters.
These constructs are used to manage the space on the disk as files are
created, expanded and deleted. The larger the disk, the more space these
structures take.

 

[Robert Jacobs]

A format wont use 71mb
What does Disk Management say?









- Show quoted text -

Not necessarily just the format, but the files system as well. This
is actually a VERY reasonable amount of spaced to be "used" by a newly
formatted hard drive with a file system. Read up on it.

 

[Teflon]

Not necessarily just the format, but the files system as well. This
is actually a VERY reasonable amount of spaced to be "used" by a newly
formatted hard drive with a file system. Read up on it.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Thanks to all for responding. That all made sense, but bare with me
awhile longer, there is still something confusing me, the email
response from the HDD manufacturer regarding the mysterious '71.1MB
usage. They told me to just format the drive to get that 71.1MB
back. From what I've been told here, that may just exacerbate the
situation.

Does a new HDD need to be reformatted? If so, to what? The
literature that came with the drive said it was already formatted as a
NTFS volume at the factory. Does it have to be formatted again? The
literature suggested FAT32. I have WinXP, do I really want to format
this drive to FAT32?

I appreciate your patience, and yes, I have tried to read up on this
issue, but I fear the convoluted explanations by the manufacturer's
tech support, Simpletech (the name may say it all), may be leading me
astray.

BTW, I've never understood why these foreign manufacturers, trying to
do business in the US, don't avail themselves to tech-writers and
proof-readers whose native language is English. Could there be a
business opportunity here?

 

[Bruce Sanderson]

Well, I just formatted an 18 GB partition. The "Properties" show:

Used space: 68,186,112 bytes - 65.0 MB
Free space: 20,034,296,160 bytes - 18.6 GB
Capacity: 20,102,582,272 bytes - 18.7 GB

So, it would appear that 71 MB of used space on a newly formatted 250 GB
drive would be reasonable.

As has been stated before, the file system (NTFS) builds a bunch of
structures that take hard disk space - these are required to manage the
files and folders that you will be putting into the rest of the disk space.
The file system is self contained - if you have files and folders on a
drive, you can remove the drive from the existing computer, connect that
drive to another computer and immediatly access all the files and folders -
there is no meta data for a disk/partition stored elsewhere (unless you are
using a special feature such as "mirroring"). The meta data for those files
and folders takes disk space - always has and always will.

Unless Disk Management shows a block of "Unallocated Space", you're getting
what you're going to get. There is not much point with fussing about it -
you aren't going to make the "empty" file system structures any smaller.
Out of 250 GB, 71 MB is insignificant - less than 0.03% of the total space.

If Disk Management reports the disk/partition as "Healthy" and formatted
NTFS, you're good to go. If you want to re-format, as long as you don't
have any files or folders on the disk yet, it will do no harm, but the
result will be the same. If you do a full format (as opposed to a "Quick
Format"), each sector on the disk will be read and written. Any faulty
sectors (happens sometimes) will be marked in the file system structures as
"unavailable" and won't be used for your data. Use the commnad "chkdsk" to
get a report of the status of the disk. For example, on the just formatted
18 GB partition, chkdsk reports:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is D0P2Spare.

WARNING! F parameter not specified.
Running CHKDSK in read-only mode.

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
32 file records processed.
File verification completed.
0 large file records processed.
0 bad file records processed.
0 EA records processed.
0 reparse records processed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
90 index entries processed.
Index verification completed.
5 unindexed files processed.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 3)...
32 security descriptors processed.
Security descriptor verification completed.
7 data files processed.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.

19631429 KB total disk space.
307220 KB in 3 files.
12 KB in 9 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
66585 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
19257612 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
4907857 total allocation units on disk.
4814403 allocation units available on disk.

The "7 data files" are all part of the file system, including the "System
Volume Information" folder which NTFS creates on every partition. By
default, on "SYSTEM" has any permission to this folder, so even
administrators can't view or do anything directly with this folder.

I suggest NOT using FAT32. NTFS is more robust and has built-in access
controls (security) that is not available with FAT32.

(Vista and Longhorn can only be installed on an NTFS partition.)