Hard drive utilization conflict

Computer Help and Discussions The Lounge
1

Friend of mine has a 20 gig drive on her XP machine. The drive properties shows her using 17 of 19 gig. To clear out some space, I first had her check what files she could archive to CD and what needed to stay.

When she adds up the 15 or so top-level folders in her drive, it totals around 9 gig. This didn't make sense, since everything should be accounted for in those folders plus the additional files in the drive. So I had her download Disk Recon, which is a glorified search tool that also lists size and number of files for folders. The program showed 9 gig used. I ran the same search on my PC (Win2k), and it had the same utilization on both the C drive properties and Disk Recon.

Can someone explain this to me?

2

Anyone...?

3

The only thing I can think of is to run Check Disk and allow it to do a surface scan. You can do this by:

1. Opening My Computer.

2. Right clicking a hard disk, and selecting Properties.

3. Click the Tools tab, and then click the Check Now button.

4. Check mark all Check Disk options, and when asked to check on the next system restart select Yes, and then reboot.

There's of course no gaurantee this will fix the problem, however it's a start.

4

a gig will be taken up by the swap file, some of the space is reserved for the recycle bin and then theres good old system restore

5

Hidden files were accounted for. The only difference between hers and mine that might make the difference is the system restore. I don't know what it's called, and if it would be 7 gig worth of files. Doesn't make any sense to me.

6

Without knowing what brand of drive it is, I can only guess. If it is an older drive, you may be able to obtain a patch from the manufacturer to fix it. At one time, there were barriers that could not be exceeded. Is this a new problem, and has the hard drive on the machine in question been replaced? You may need a BIOS update.