Hello All,

I use my secondary hard drive for video editing, and large file manipulations, etc... Well the drive is a Western Digital 80 Gig HDD. The actual capacity of the drive is 74.5 Gigs.

Ok, so if I open up the drive and select all the contents within it, it comes out to a little over 30.5 gigs. If I were to then just right click on the drive itself and view its properties, it says I used 70.2 Gigs. :blink:

If you do the math, that is certainly not correct! :P

Where did the extra space go? And how would I get it back without having to format the drive?

Thanks in advance!
-SlickVic78

Try running a chkdsk /f on the drive. It might fix incorrectly reported free space.

Also, check that under the properies, you are looking at "size on disk" as opposed to the normal size. Because of the way most file systems work, file sizes are rounded up to the nearest block (usually 4kB), so if you have thousands of very small files, a lot of space is wasted.

Hey Zone-MR,

Thanks for the suggestion. I ran chkdsk /F. Nothing has changed. Also, I just removed about 9 Gigs from a directory I had on the drive, and I am not getting that space back... :blink:

-SlickVic78

My first thought would be to make sure I could see all the files including the "hidden" ones then under the VIEW tab then Details in Explorer arrange all the Icons according to size - that might tell you if you have any large SYS files or weird things (TMP files )taking up space.

Hello richardc2000,

I am already set to view hidden files and folders. There shouldn't be anything hidden on this drive since no programs are installed on it. It only contains files or folders that I manually copy over to it. It only stores videos when I am working on video editting, and also contains the final DVD images when ready to burn. There is nothing else that sits on this drive.

It shouldn't have anything to do with the drive's partition not being active does it? The only active partition I have is my Primary hard drive. The only possible way I am able to get back the lost space is if I format the drive, but I shouldn't have to do this all the time.

-SlickVic78

Is your computer hijacked, or has been so recently?

This is going to be a silly question Did you empty your Recycle bin ? I think that XP allocates 10% by default .

@ unicorn,

My system has not been hijacked.

@ Firefox,

I have the system set to automatically delete the files from the secondary drive instead of going to the recycle bin. Even if that were the case, 10% of the secondary drive is no more than 4 gigs.

Besides, there is no recycle bin visible within the secondary drive when I view it in Windows Explorer.

-SlickVic78

Delete all temp files and reboot. See if anything happens.

Also, may want to scan with Norton Disk Doctor for example.

If you use irc or invision a good chance someone has Hijacked your pc. And use your pc as a bot to spread there stuff. It happened to me from the group #rewind on HIGHtIRC thats why I dont use irc no more and stay away from rewind now. I also found out the one that was hacking my server pc was from there crew. (IT SUCKS WHEN I FOUND OUT FROM A FRIEND THAT IS A IT PRO THAT SET A MONITORING SOFT ON MY PC TO FIND OUT WHAT IS GOING ON WHEN WE FINALLY CAUGHT THEM IT ENDED UP THAT THEY WERE STEALING AN AVERAGE OF 18GIGS OF BANDWITH OUT OF MY PC A WEEKUP and 10GIGS DOWN) I tought they were friends there but now I don't trust them anymore and only use ftp and torrents.

My to cents worth

cheers

Protecteur

Hey war59312,

I checked the drive to see if there were any temp files - nothing.

I am currently in the process of defragging the drive since it is heavily fragmented with all the editing I have done.

I continue to welcome all the great suggestions!

Thank you,
-SlickVic78

Hello protecteur,

I don't use IRC, nor have I ever had such programs on my system.

Just did some tests.

I had about 5 gigs of old rar files on my primary drive. I deleted them from the computer, and the amount of space left available on the drive increased - which is correct.

So this is not happening to my primary drive, just my secondary drive...

-SlickVic78

I am running perfect disk 6.0 and while I am only running one internal HD (80Gig) and 1 external drive (200Gig). You can tell it to analyze the drive and it will then show you the exact amount of space taken up by what ever. You can also use the defrag utility for xp and see what is really there. Good Luck

Thanks
Dudelive

Hey Dudelive,

Thanks for the tip. I too have PerfectDisk. Just found out where all my extra space is going too... The pesty Norton Protect is holding on to the large files I am deleting. I have disabled Norton Protect on my primary drive, but not on my secondary drive. I got all the space back after I purged the files from the protected recycle bin! WOOT!

Thanks again everyone for helping me with this issue! :) Have a beer on me! :beer:

-SlickVic78

Damn it!! Was about to say that. :( It just hit me that u might have that on if u use norton.

Well glad you figured it out on your own. :)

A tricky one. I didn't think anyone still used Norton... Got me on that one.

(and congratulations to all those gigs you just rewarded)

The Norton Recycle Bin in NAV2003 is a major pain for that reason. how many times do you need to see "are you sure you want to delete these files...?"

If you want to disable it, be sure to delete all Norton Protected files before disabling the Norton Recycle Bin, otherwise it will keep them.