Hard drive reading incorrect free space?

K

KaErF

n00b
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Jun 7, 2004
Messages
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Ok well I don't know how this happened but Windows is reading two different amounts of free space. I haven't gone past the lesser amount yet so I don't know if it will let me add more data but defrag doesnt want to run because there is a low amount of disk space.

wtf.JPG
 
I don't get this post...

You posted a screenshot of your D: drive.... it has 160GB used on it.
You posted a screenshot of a folder called MAME on your D: drive that is 100GB big.

So your problem would be.....?
 
I think he is talking about why is the Size of the file and Size on disk is different. IF this is what you are asking this is because the size is th actual size of the file itself but size on disk is th amount of space it actually takes up. This varys on the cluster size. For example if you had a 1MB cluster size (just an example) and a 1.2MB file then it would take up 2MB on the disk because only one file can use up a cluster.
 
Your drive is compressed.

When you compress a drive, it reports in the drive properties the most possible space that data can be stored in IF it can compress everything to the max.

Your second screen is missing a lot of details. There are folders and files that are not visible to the file explorer that won't be taken into account for if you highlight everything in the root of your hard drive and select Properties. Also, the pagefile won't be listed in the file view but IS taken into account for the drive properties. As a side note, the pagefile CANNOT be compressed so whatever size it is will be a true size report, not a compressed size. Since your drive is compressed, I'm willing to bet it's in the 1Gigabyte range or larger.

Defrag probably won't run because you have that drive practically filled and that is BAD. Defrag requires uncompressed space large enough to hold:
A. The Pagefile
B. The data it is currently moving to create unfragmented room
C. The data being moved to the appropriate blocks.

If there isn't enough space to accomidate the average file size, it won't run.

Bottom line, you need a larger hard drive or a second drive to move most of your data off to. Running a PC with a drive that full WILL lead to data corruption, excessive fragmentation and inevitably, Windows failure.
 
and one last note, just in case you're also wondering why windows says the drive capacity is 200,038,776,932 bytes, and then saying the capacity is 186 gigabytes.....

1024 bytes=1 Kbyte 1024 Kbytes= 1 Mbyte 1024 Mbytes= 1 Gbyte

200,038,776,932/1024/1024/1024= (aproximately) 186 gigabytes.
 
The_Mage18 said:
Your drive is compressed.

When you compress a drive, it reports in the drive properties the most possible space that data can be stored in IF it can compress everything to the max.
Click to expand...

This statement is incorrect. NTFS file compression only shows the actual amount of drive space remaining. It can't predict space based on compression, because it doesn't know if future files will be compressed. On NTFS, compression is a file by file attribute, even on drives where compression is enabled when the drive is formatted.

The disk compression licensed by MS and used on Windows 9x based OS's did report free space based on an assumed 2:1 compression ratio, because all items on a particular drive would be compressed since they were actually stored in a single compressed file that represented the HD. Compression was not controlled at the file level, but at the drive level.

Another issue with comparing the two ways data is displayed in the two dialogs is hidden files. Right-clicking a drive makes a different API call to determine space usage on the drive. It looks at the Bitmap free total in the master file table.

Highlighting all the items showing on D: does an addition of all file sizes, but only for files that show in the user interface. If the user has not selected the options for showing hidden and system files, hidden and system files sizes would be left out of this count, but would be included in the space count generated by right-clicking on the drive icon itself.

Also, in a multi-user environment, only the files to which the user has access would be counted. If the user was specifically denied read access to some files, those files would not be counted by selecting all files in the root of the drive, although that space would be accounted for in determining the remaining free space in the bitmap of the master file table.
 
thedude42 said:
and one last note, just in case you're also wondering why windows says the drive capacity is 200,038,776,932 bytes, and then saying the capacity is 186 gigabytes.....

1024 bytes=1 Kbyte 1024 Kbytes= 1 Mbyte 1024 Mbytes= 1 Gbyte

200,038,776,932/1024/1024/1024= (aproximately) 186 gigabytes.
Click to expand...


And the fact that those are divisible by 8. Not 10 like some people think. If it was divisible by 10, it would be 1000 bytes = 1 KB etc.
 
Enable view hidden files in explorer. With hidden files hidden, it will not report their size, well, because they are hidden.
 
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