PDA

View Full Version : Free space does not update after file deletion

vladrassvet
03-21-2007, 11:57 PM
Hey, everyone,

I have Windows 2000 SP4 and Windows XP SP2 running on two machines and on both of them sometimes after I delete some files in explorer using Shift+Del, they disappear initially, but on accessing the directory become visible again and cannot be deleted (since they are marked as "already deleted" in the MFT, I guess). Free space however DOES NOT refresh itself up in explorer! :mad: Rebooting the machine solves the problem, but I don't want to keep rebooting the computers constantly. The drives are NTFS.

And NO, I don't have any friggin' Norton software installed on any of the drives, so Norton Protected Bin is out of question! :) I tried googling up, but apparently all links just point out that the problem is with Norton and people don't know what it does.

Anyone experienced the same issues? Any ideas? :confused:
bbz_Ghost
03-22-2007, 12:05 AM
I'd say run a chkdsk /f on both drives, force the reboot if necessary (and it probably will be) and see what happens. If that turns up nothing, then it's wide open as to what's causing it, I've never seen such an occurrence in decades of using computers.

But then again, Windows does something new just about every day... :)
vladrassvet
03-22-2007, 04:48 PM
Yep, ran Chkdsk, all was fine. I actually figured that one out later on. What happens when you have something like simultaneous 50+ file reads/writes (running server off the old disk) and an old P3 500 cpu? That's right, slow refresh times. The file DID finally disappear after reappearing, but that happened only after 3 minutes or so. I wonder if I can speed that disk up a bit or, probably, it's not worth it. DMA is enabled, caching as well, so that's the limit, I guess.

Haha, that observation kinda scared me about my Windows installation - didn't want to do it all over again. ;)
vladrassvet
03-23-2007, 04:57 PM
Hehe, well, Windows XP is a better platform than Windows 2000 SP4 in terms of free space refresh. Windows 2000 is pretty dumb on my machine (or am I dumb, I dunno) and deleted file don't disappear. So after browsing around I found this pretty nice free utitlity - http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/ It unlocks all the processes accessing the file and then - BANG - you delete the file and free space is updated immediately. Couldn't have imagined better. :)